Instagram bug costs some users millions of followers, fix is coming soon

Are you one of the few chosen ones who lost half of your hard earned followers overnight? Well, don't be confused because you have done nothing wrong from your end. It’s basically a new creepy new bug that is causing a “change in account follower numbers.” The bug precisely occurred late Tuesday when some Instagrammers noticed something off in their followers' numbers.[caption id="attachment_5575361" align="alignnone" width="1024"]

Instagram Logo art.[/caption]As per the complaints posted by people on Twitter, some lost a handful of followers. But the issue took a wave on popular celebrities like Kylie Jenner, Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian whose follower count dropped by over a million. The glitch affecting the celebrity's followers count was discovered by social media consultant Matt Nirvana who compiled the numbers of the ‘popular accounts’ that were affected.Popular YouTube creators like James Charles took to the social platform as well to question the issue and complained about losing over half a million followers in just a few hours.While Twitter was ablaze with a pile of complaints about the Instagram glitch, the company acknowledging it, however, assured that everything will ‘soon resume back to normal.’

Instagram in a statement said, “We’re expecting to have this issue resolved by 9 a.m. PST tomorrow. We understand this is frustrating, and our team is hard at work to get things back to normal.”Fast Company in its report suggested that Instagram took actions to remove millions of accounts that the company ‘believed to be inauthentic.’ Notably, the social networking service has a history of sweeping off spam or inactive accounts. Back in 2014, Instagram followers count plunged after spam purge. The company at the time stated that it eliminated spam or inactive accounts that violated community guidelines.While the latest purge is said to be a deliberate act to shut down fake accounts, Fast Company citing Instagram’s November note suggested that it should not be a surprise for users.“We will begin removing inauthentic likes, follows and comments from accounts that use third-party apps to boost their popularity. We’ve built machine learning tools to help identify accounts that use these services and remove the inauthentic activity,” Instagram mentioned in a blog post in November.Insta’s move will for sure affect those users who ‘stand to profit’ from their followers' numbers. However, it will at least save those new Instagrammers from tapping on the spam accounts.