On the 13th of February, 2019, several public figures and influencers took to Instagram and twitter to report about the drastic drop in followers.
Here is the reason behind this drop in followers count and the related tweets. Read on to know more.
The Reason – App Bug –
According to TechCrunch, the users wondered if Instagram inactivated fake accounts, as a part of its fight against spam.
But immediately after this drastic change, the company encountered a lot of criticism over Twitter.
This was done by various public figures such as James Charles, Stephanie Duran, Don Benjamin and many many more. All these influencers ended up mentioning their concerns about the drop in followers overnight.
Whereas the actual reason, as confirmed by Instagram, was in fact that a bug was causing this error.
More Insight –
Direct Message Now on Instagram Web
Instagram switched Horizontal and people went Crazy!
The Tweets regarding the followers count and the resultant Bug
One user wrote, “so I just lost like 4K on Instagram and it unfollowed like 100 people within a matter of minutes? what’s going on [whining emoji] 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?!”
Instagram confirmed the news about its bug via Twitter that it was working to resolve the issue as soon 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.”
“We’re expecting to have this issue resolved by 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST) tomorrow. We understand this is frustrating, and our team is hard at work to get things back to normal”. It added further.
Instagram bug was reported with in just few hours after the twitter counts got affected due to a similar bug which caused constant fluctuations on the number of Likes, Retweets.
Even Twitter confirmed the bug, tweeting, “Some people around the world are experiencing an issue with notifications, likes and retweets. We’re working on resolving this and will follow up soon. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Both the social media platforms Twitter and Instagram have over 1 billion global active users and how many of them have been affected by this bug aren’t clear.
Earlier this week even Facebook experienced a bug where in Facebook automatically added audience targeting to video posts by pages, which greatly diminished the reach of those posts, saysAdweek.
