The Symfony blog has posted an announcement about the major milestone the project has reached - the framework has passed 500 million downloads since the original release of the first versions of Symfony 2.

We did it! On September 26th, we achieved a huge milestone: 500 million Symfony packages have been downloaded by the PHP community! Thank you to the countless developers, contributors, companies, conferences and users that have made this massive number a reality. The Symfony ecosystem now consists of over 70 packages, several of which are downloaded, on average, over 50 thousand times every day!

The rest of the post talks about the road that lead to 500 million downloads, the pervasiveness of Symfony components and the work they've done on the Backwards Compatibility Promise and Continuous Upgrade Path. The post also includes several pictures members of the Symfony community took as the counter approached the 500 million mark.