Instagram released traffic analytics for the first time in the service’s history last week, showing that in contrast to reports that its user base declined over the holidays it actually saw a ten percent bump between December and January.

Back in December the photo-sharing site left many users disgruntled when it altered its terms of services insinuating the Facebook-owned platform could sell photos to third-party advertising without permission. The backlash from the move was followed by a report from research firm AppData announcing the service may have lost up to 25 percent of its user base after the terms of service change. Shortly afterwards, Facebook announced that it was replacing unfettered access to app data information with internally generated reports.

But the hoopla over App Data’s reported Instagram user decline was never a solid indicator of how many people use the service at a given time. The analytics service measured Instagram activity connected to users’ Facebook accounts, which many Instagram users do not currently use.

Now, Instagram has released its own statistics reporting that it actually experienced growth rather than a decline during the holiday period. The social platform brings in 90 million monthly active users (MAU) and sees an average of 40 million photo uploads per day. It also reports having 8,500 Facebook “Likes” per second and over 1,000 photo comments per second.

One thing absent to note from the numbers is a daily active user count, which was the data AppData had pulled from Facebook. That raises the question whether there is some credibility to reports of a decline in day to day users.

Source: AllThingsD