Several Instagram users on Wednesday woke up to find their follower counts significantly decreased.
Many of the app’s most popular celebrities experienced a significant drop in followers due to a glitch.
“We’re aware of an issue that is causing a change in account follower numbers for some people right now,” Instagram said in a tweet. “We’re working to resolve this as quickly as possible.”
The Instagram bug has eaten away at the follower counts of many of the site’s top users. For example, Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber lost 1.9 million and 1.7 million followers respectively.
And they weren’t the only ones. Ariana Grande’s account dropped from 145 million followers to 143 million. Kylie Jenner and Selena Gomez also saw huge drops of more than 2 million followers each.
Along with mainstream celebrities, The Verge reports that several popular YouTube creators experienced big drops in their follower counts as well.
“Why did I just lose over half a million followers, Instagram,” tweeted James Charles, a prominent YouTube creator who currently has 14.3 million followers on Instagram.
The follower drop is affecting more than just Instagram’s biggest accounts as well. Users with just hundreds or thousands of followers are noticing a significant loss too.
Many users first assumed that Instagram was undergoing a systemwide bot purge. Many social media platforms routinely sweep the platform for bots and other spam accounts in order to more accurately portray the number of real users on the service. For example, Twitter‘s most recent purge last year attracted lots of attention as high-profile users like Barack Obama and Kim Kardashian lost millions of followers.
But Instagram’s official statement makes it clear that this isn’t the case. It’s currently unknown whether the glitch is just affecting the actual count number or if the issue has caused an actual mass unfollowing across the platform.
Some Instagram users are already reporting that their accounts have been updated with the lost followers being returned to their follower count.
Source: Mashable.com
Too bad