2.1 billion people have internet connection, says report

More than 2.1 billion people now have access to an internet connection, according to a study.

Web research firm Pingdom revealed the figure, also confirming that there are currently more than 555 million websites in operation.

Pingdom's data also confirms that there are significantly more email addresses in existence than there are internet users, with 3.146 billion active accounts. Around 71% of the world's email traffic was found to be spam.

"As we put more of our personal as well as professional lives online, we will come to rely on the internet in ways we could hardly imagine before. For better or worse, the internet is now a critical component in almost everything we do," read a statement from Pingdom.

Social networking profiles and instant messenger accounts also exceed the number of web users, clocking in at 2.4 billion and 2.6 billion respectively.

Facebook accounted for more than 800 million of the social networking accounts, a quarter of which were created last year. YouTube's logged video playbacks now exceed 1 trillion.

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