Something strange happened in the land of Instagram last night and the double-tapping celebs are not happy.
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The photo-based app either did one of its annual purges of fake followers or there was some kind of major glitch ‘coz a bunch of accounts lost scores of followers but as always, the people most affected were the Hollywood elite.
Ariana Grande‘s follower count reportedly dropped from 145 million followers to 142 million, while Kylie Jenner, who had almost 127 million, is now down to 126 million.
Meanwhile queen Selena Gomez went from over 145 million to 143 million and Kim Kardashian West suffered a loss of 2 million supporters, having gone from 125 million followers to 127 million. Even Justin Bieber felt a 1.7 million drop.
Her royal highness wouldn’t be too pleased either (if she knows what the heck Instagram is) as Kensington Palace’s official account reportedly lost over 150,000 followers last night, via Hello!.
Makeup mogul James Charles took to Twitter to confess that he had lost over half a mill in followers.
“Why did I just lose over half a million followers @instagram wyd sis,” he wrote.
why did I just lose over half a million followers @instagram wyd sis
— James Charles (@jamescharles) February 13, 2019
Well, Instagram must’ve listened ‘coz they issued the following tweet (lol Instagram tweeted) and by the sounds of things, it may have been more of a glitch than an intentional purge.
“We’re aware of an issue that is causing a change in account follower numbers for some people right now,” the tweet read. “We’re working to resolve this as quickly as possible.”
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
That being said, back in November, the social media app released a blog post where they vowed to remove “inauthentic likes, follows and comments from accounts that use third-party apps to boost their popularity.”
Adding, “We’ve built machine learning tools to help identify accounts that use these services and remove the inauthentic activity.”
Considering the big sweep occurred just months after said post went live, I’m wondering if it was a mass bot kill operation in the guise of a glitch.
