Maybe Instagram wants to quell rumors that Instagram is leaking users. Maybe they simply thought it was the right time. Whatever the case, they have just put up monthly active user stats for public consumption, for the first time ever.

And according to them, the service currently sees 90 million MAUs. For a little bit of context, that puts Instagram at just shy of half the MAUs reported by Twitter last month (200M) and just shy of Google+’s reported 135M MAUs.

Facebook, who acquired Instagram last year, boasts over one billion MAUs.

On their press page, Instagram also boasts some more user stats.

• 40 million photos uploaded per day
• 8,500 likes per second (10,000 at peak)
• 1,000 comments per second

Of course, now is an interesting time for Instagram to unveil its monthly active user count. Around the holidays, reports emerged that said Instagram was bleeding users, and fast. For their part, Instagram denied this, saying that the data (provided by AppData) was “inaccurate.”

“We continue to see strong and steady growth in both registered and active users of Instagram,” they said.

Many suggested that the purported data plunge was either just a blip, or that it was symptomatic of the holiday season, which causes a drop in plenty of other apps’ usage as well. Plus, AppData’s data only comes from Facebook-connected users, which only represent a small portion of Instagram’s total users.

But people were quick to jump on the “tragic fall of Instagram,” considering the company had just been through a huge privacy dustup and came out the other side apologetic and possibly scathed.

You may remember that Mark Zuckerberg said Instagram had passed 100 million users back in September 2012, but that was just users, not monthly active users. So it’s probably not the case that users have actually declined over the past few months.