In January 18th, the biggest web protest of all times has taken place where many major/medium/small internet companies went partially or completely dark, demonstrating the force they all hold together against a common enemy (the SOPA/PIPA bills). The result: The internet gained a big victory after the SOPA/PIPA bills are now down from the table.

The online protest day on January 18th generated some pretty astonishing stats. Here are the numbers i managed to gather so far:

• Reports are indicating that a range of 75,000 to 115,000 websites have participated in the protest (7,000 were fully darkened).
• 162 million people was reading the Wikipedia’s blackout page.
• Google alone collected 7 million signatures in a petition against the bills (with the link in their homepage). Also, Google crawled the web about 60%-80% slower.
• 103,785 people have signed a petition calling the Obama administration to stop the web censorship legislation.
• 1.5 million people have signed similar anti SOPA/PIPA petitions across the web.
• More than 2 million emails have been sent to different congressmen.
• About 35,000 letters have been sent by people to their representatives.
• More than 525,000 “Likes” and nearly 100,000 shares to Mark Zuckerberg Facebook post opposing SOPA and PIPA.
• About 40 million people worldwide watched Mozilla’s blackout page and about 1.8 million visited the site’s take action page.
• More than 45,000 SOPA protest WordPress Plugins have been downloaded.
• 323,445 Flickr photos have been darkened and had 2,117,937 views.
• There were more than 3.9 million SOPA-related Tweets.

As a result to these amazing numbers from the web, the reaction from the political arena arrived pretty quickly: So far, 18 senators have withdrawn their prior support for the bills (11 of them were among the original bill’s sponsors), leaving no choice for the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to postpone the PIPA vote.

Indeed, a great victory for the internet.