What happens when a multi-billion-dollar social network steals your app’s name?

Independent developer Mike Swanson asked that question Monday when he learned that Instagram had released Layout, the Facebook-owned company’s new iPhone app for creating photo collages.

The Instagram faithful churns out 70 million photos daily. But if you weren’t able to share your meal or tell the story of your quirky cat in a single picture, you had to post multiple photos.

That changed Monday. Instagram introduced Layout, a new free app that lets you combine images into a single post. The news was announced on the Instagram blog.

Users can open Layout and drag and drop photos from their camera roll to any of the custom templates. Flip, rotate, resize and create mirror effects in your layouts.

That’s right, folks — that downtime earlier today wasn’t to introduce new products, but to update the online store instead. Apple has made purchasing the iPad 2 a much nicer experience, and seems to have tweaked things behind the scenes to make its online store a lot snappier.