After all the fuss over whether or not Instagram lost users over the holidays, Facebook has decided the best solution is to just ignore the problem altogether.
In fact, it’s just pulled user count data out of Instagram’s Developer API entirely. The graph above shows monthly active users as measured by Facebook logins: on January 7 it was 45.8 million, and on Janurary 8 that number is zero.
It doesn’t mean Instagram isn’t performing — its weekly and monthly users are almost certainly still steadily climbing — it just means Facebook doesn’t much want to share that data if it can help it. It’s not surprising: all Facebook apps have been this way since December 2011, it’s just taken it a little while to apply that change to Instagram too. [TechCrunch]