Instagram flirts with Facebook as it breaks record 200 million users mark

Facebook-owned photo-sharing service Instagram has announced it has grown to more than 200 million active users 'capturing and sharing their lives every month.'

The milestone comes almost exactly 13 months after Instagram announced it had reached its first 100 million users. In the last six months alone, 50 million people have signed up for Instagram, the company revealed in a . To date, Instagram users have shared an impressive 20 billion photos on the service.

'Over the past six months, we've seen new communities coming together in cities and towns across the world, whether they be in Guthrie, Oklahoma, or Guatemala City,' Instagram wrote. 'With January's Worldwide InstaMeet 8, we saw record turnouts of communities coming together to form friendships, explore new places and celebrate creativity in all corners of the globe from New Dehli to New York, Bucharest, Nairobi and beyond.'

Meanwhile, some changes are reportedly afoot for the popular app. Instagram may be ending its partnership with the location-based service Foursquare and instead leveraging Facebook Places to let users tag the location of their photo, according to a this week from Fast Company. The company is currently testing the new Facebook Places-powered tagging feature with a subset of users.

In other Instagram news, the company also recently rolled out an update for its iOS app, bringing a new slider for the Lux feature that lets you customize the contrast and saturation of your photo. Instagram also updated its Android app with a simplified design and speed improvements that should allow your profile screen to load twice as fast.

The latest Instagram news, meanwhile, was released last night as Facebook announced its $2 billion acquisition of virtual reality firm Oculus VR.