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…
so I just lost like 4K on Instagram and it unfollowed like 100 people within a matter of minutes? what’s going on 😩
like I’m not mad about my follower count cause I’d rather have less spam followers and better engagement but like why is it unfollowing people?!
— stephanie duran (@ItsSteephh) February 13, 2019
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.
INSTAGRAM FOLLOWER CULL 📉
Last night Instagram removed inactive / bot accounts from all accounts, globally.
I’ve woken up to an inbox full of messages from concerned people / influences and brands who have in some cases, lost millions of followers while they were asleep!🤭😅 pic.twitter.com/ItUXqqmwQT
— Steve Bartlett (@stevebartlettsc) February 13, 2019
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?
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