Instagram Follower Counter Going Nuts? It's Not You, It's Them

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Is your follower counter going nuts on Instagram? Lost hundreds of followers for no reason? Don’t worry, it’s a system bug and Instagram is working on it.

Ask any marketer and they will tell you that followers are nothing but a vanity metric. In fact, mst people would tell you so. Until they start losing hundreds or thousands overnight, and all will FREAK OUT!

For the past few days, Instagram users have been concerned about their follower counter going nuts. Some lost thousands of followers, before gaining many back. Even the number of people they were following was dropping…

https://twitter.com/ItsSteephh/status/1095515916144541697

why did I just lose over half a million followers @instagram wyd sis
— James Charles (@jamescharles) February 13, 2019

At first people thought that the company was cleaning up its platform, culling inactive and fake accounts by the thousands.

https://twitter.com/stevebartlettsc/status/1095585123058311169

But, as it happens, it was a bug. Instagram confirmed that an issue has been affecting some accounts’ follower counters.

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

“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,” the company said on Twitter. Instagram also promised that everything should go back to normal within the day.

The Insta-bug happened only a few hours after Twitter had suffered its own issues with the Like count on tweets, which has also been resolved since.

Maybe, just maybe, it is finally time to move away from silly vanity metrics? What do you say?