On Tuesday, activists, celebrities, policymakers, journalists, businesses and organizations lit up the Internet to protest the NSA’s mass surveillance programs. We pushed our members of Congress to support the USA Freedom Act, which would curb some of the NSA’s worst abuses.

By day’s end, 89,000 people had called their members of Congress and 550,000 people had sent emails to their elected officials.

As The Day We Fight Back progressed, we noted six amazing moments:

• People were placing calls to Congress at the rate of 5,000 per hour by midmorning.
• Google, Twitter and other big Internet companies sent messages to millions of users, urging them to take action and spread the word. And the Free Press Action Fund was among many organizations — including the ACLU, Demand Progress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Greenpeace and RootsAction — whose members participated in the online protest.
• Celebrities like Mark Ruffalo and Evangeline Lilly, veteran journalists like Bill Moyers, and members of Congress like Reps. Raul Grijalva and Zoe Lofgren and Sens. Rand Paul, Tom Udall and Ron Wyden took to social media to spread the word.
• More than 6,000 websites put up images supporting the action — including social media stars like Upworthy, blogs like BoingBoing, Web platforms like Drupal and companies like ThoughtWorks.
• People in Canada, Colombia, India, Ireland, South Africa and Sweden gathered at dozens of worldwide events.
• Cartoonists got active, and winners of a recent Web We Want contest were announced. Check out the winning anti-surveillance images here, here and here.

It’s not too late to take action. Go to TheDayWeFightBack.org and call your legislators now. We’ll give you a script and help connect you directly to them.

While the fight for our privacy is still on and it’ll take all of us to pass the USA Freedom Act, the success of the Day We Fight Back shows that worldwide opposition to mass surveillance programs is growing by the minute.

And this day of action follows on the heels of thousands of people speaking up at October’s Rally Against Mass Surveillance in Washington, D.C.

There’s a battle on another front, too. Since a federal court overturned the Net Neutrality protections on Jan. 14, millions of us have pushed the Federal Communications Commission to reclassify broadband and pass strong Net Neutrality rules. The fights to reclaim our privacy and maintain a free and open network are intertwined.

And so we’ll keep standing up for our rights to connect and communicate until our elected and appointed officials do the right thing.

Click here for more stats from the Day We Fight Back.