Instagram announces 80 million users, updates app and loses a Twitter API all in one day

Today is certainly seeing plenty of news coming out of the Instagram camp. Some good, some not so good. We'll start on a positive note though. Instagram now has a pretty impressive 80 million users worldwide, due in no small part to the expansion of the platform to Android. The total number of photos shared via the service has also reached a milestone, topping 4 billion now. The takeover by Facebook thankfully doesn't seem to have adversely affected users perceptions. Although, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook's first ever earnings call, the acquisition hasn't yet closed, which is why we've seen no integration of the two. Anything on that front will be delivered in an update when the time comes. In any case, it gives us a good eeling that Android has been such a positive part of the platforms growth. 
The Android app itself has also seen an update today, which while small brings a pretty important fix for some users. It seems some devices were seeing a black screen on the filters page, but all that should now be gone with todays update. You can grab it for yourselves using the download link below. 
Which then brings us to the not so good news. It looks like the Twitter API crackdown is definitely underway, and Instagram has just become a high-profile casualty. Trying to find your Twitter friends on Instagram now brings up the message you see here. The pre-update app still allowed you to find friends in this way, and indeed re-installing that version sees the feature return. Oddly, Twitter friends remains in the "find friends" menu instead of just having been removed completely. Making a point perhaps? You can still share your photos directly to Twitter on upload, at least for now, but finding friends is out of the equation if you update. If this is a valuable feature to you guys, it's probably worth holding out on this one. 


Source: Instagram Blog, Download: Instagram