Instagram now has almost twice the number of users as the entire U.S. population

Instagram has officially hit a major milestone: the 600 million monthly user mark.

That's nearly twice the population of the United States posting food pics and skyline shots at least once a month, for some context.

In a blog post this morning, Insta announced the big news and thanked its faithful audience for "being you":

A lot has changed this year, but the Instagram community and the diversity of expression it provides has remained consistent. And you now have more ways to share than ever before with Instagram Stories, live video and disappearing photos and videos in Direct. Additionally, with updated safety tools that give you more control over comments and other parts of your experience, we’re working to make Instagram safer than ever for connection and self-expression.

Instagram says it's experienced rapid growth in the past six months, with 100 million users added since June. As the blog post points out, a slew of new features have rolled out over that period, many of which have brought Insta's core functions closer to that of its biggest competitor, Snapchat.

Even with 600 million monthly users, Instagram is small potatoes compared to Facebook, the behemoth social network that it's owned by. Facebook claimed 1.18 billion daily active users worldwide as of September.

But the photo-sharing app is larger than Twitter, which had 313 million monthly users as of June. It's unclear how it stacks up to Snapchat's 150 million daily users, as Instagram has only broken out monthly numbers.

As the lines between the features and functions of these services blur even more, the competition will get fiercer. For now, Instagram continues to rise — so go ahead and post another shameless selfie to help it celebrate.