Overnight Instagram deleted thousands of fake accounts, decreasing the number of followers of users. Here’s what’s happening
If you woke up this morning with tens, hundreds or thousands fewer followers on Instagram, rest assured, you’re not the only one. In these hours there are many users who are looking on Twitter and other social networks for an answer to what happened. In reality it is much simpler than you might think: during the Italian night Instagram has deleted thousands of fake accounts used only to increase the number of followers.
This is a rather common practice, it is not the first time that Instagram decides to put a stop to fake accounts and delete them from the application. And the same happens on other social networks, such as Twitter. Behind the “market of followers” there is a real millionaire business. There are companies able to increase the number of followers of their account in a few hours: they manage thousands of fake accounts and use them for actions of this type. Logically, this is a borderline practice that is periodically punished by Instagram.
Why have followers decreased
The most affected accounts are those with a larger number of users. It’s certainly no secret that a rather large percentage of the followers of the most followed accounts on Instagram are fake users. Unfortunately, Instagram, as well as other social networks, has never been able to put a stop to this practice and developers are forced to delete fake profiles from time to time.
If this morning your Instagram profile has a hundred fewer followers, don’t worry. It’s not the fault of a hacker. But only of the cleaning work that the application has done during the night. We’ll see if in the next few hours Instagram will release an official communication.
UPDATE FEBRUARY 14 9:00 AM. The official communication from Instagram has arrived. The developers released a statement on Twitter in which they apologized for the incident and explained that the loss of followers is not due to the deletion of fake accounts, but to a bug that affected the application. The problem will be fixed by February 14 and all users will get their followers back.