Instagram broke itself, then the internet today as some of its most popular accounts reportedly lost vast amount of followers. Celebrities like Ariana Grande saw losses in the millions.
Instagram has been known to do sporadic clean ups of its user base to remove spam or inactive accounts. Last November, it started removing inauthentic likes, follows and comments from accounts that use third-party apps and services to boost their popularity. The company said “they’ve built machine learning tools to help identify accounts that use these services and remove the inauthentic activity.”
However, the current issue of dropping follower numbers is apparently not due to company undertaking a fake user account culling. Instead, it confirmed in a tweet that there’s a glitch that’s causing a change in account follower numbers for some users.
We’re aware of an issue that is causing a change in account follower numbers for some people right now. We’re working to resolve this as quickly as possible.
— Instagram (@instagram) February 13, 2019
Losing a vast amount of followers overnight isn’t a joke, especially for users who’ve built a base authentically and organically.
I’ve personally saw a drop of 100 followers since yesterday. I’m not super bothered but there are plenty of Instagram users out there who are not happy.
Are you affected by this bug? How many followers did you lose?
Source: Fast Company, The Verge
