Instagram and Facebook, per reports, have finally closed the deal on their $1 billion acquisition, with Instagram declaring that the popular photo sharing app has hit the 5 billion photos upload mark so far. This figure is quite a huge one and is reflective of the company's growth.

The Instagram team stated the new milestone on their official blog and assured users that the service will not change because of the deal.

"While our team is making the short move to the Facebook offices, Instagram isn't going anywhere. The Instagram app and its features will stay the same one you know and love, and we'll keep working together to build a better Instagram for everyone," stated the blog.

Facebook's share price has dropped dramatically since its IPO and Instagram originally took 23 million shares at a price of $30 a share, which means that the deal is now worth considerably less than it was in April. Moreover, in August, the Federal Trade Commission passed the deal after conducting a non-public investigation due to concern that Facebook was becoming a dominant advertiser in photo sharing.

However, Facebook, which still has more than 300 million photos uploaded to its site every day, said that that it is excited to let Instagram continue growing its product with Facebook's infrastructure resource to support it.

"As we said from the beginning, we are committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Instagram will continue to serve its community, and we will help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook's strong engineering team and infrastructure. We also can't wait to work with the talented Instagram team to improve the mobile experience," Facebook said.