Kylie Jenner, Ronaldo, and other big Instagram accounts hit by follower drops, Meta explains why

Kylie Jenner, Ronaldo, and a long list of other big-name Instagram accounts woke up to noticeably smaller follower counts today, and Meta has now explained why.

Celebrities including Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylie Jenner, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, Virat Kohli, and Priyanka Chopra all saw their numbers drop, with some losing millions overnight.

Smaller accounts got hit too, and users on Reddit, X, and Threads started picking up on it pretty quickly.

This left people asking whether Instagram had started a bot purge similar to what X did a few weeks back. Others just wanted to know what was going on with their own counts. Then came reports pointing to big celebrity accounts losing millions. A nifty roundup by @PopHubOfficial shows the number of followers popular female acts lost:

Some even pointed out the fact that this purge also resulted in Instagram’s own account losing followers.

For more stats, you can check out this account on X (@CelebRadar0) that’s tracking the drop in followers for many popular accounts.

That said, back in April, we covered how X creators lost thousands of followers during a bot purge on that platform, and the pattern here looks pretty familiar.

Meta has since responded. A spokesperson’s statement, shared by Pop Base on X, says the drops are tied to Instagram’s routine process for removing inactive accounts, with active followers apparently unaffected. Any account that was suspended but later restored will be added back to the count after verification, according to the statement.

Not everyone’s buying the “inactive accounts” explanation, at least not fully. One reply to the Pop Base post put it pretty well, noting that people watched their mutuals disappear overnight.

This is all happening at a time when people are already pretty much fed up with Meta’s moderation. Just yesterday, we reported on a wave of users receiving Instagram account suspension emails that had a lot of people worried. The day before that, we covered an alleged conversation with Meta support where an agent reportedly admitted that the selfie verification queue for restoring banned accounts was completely backed up.

And in March, we wrote about a broader ban wave across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads that left users locked out without warning.

X went through something similar earlier this year too. We covered a wave of bans for inauthentic behavior on X in March, and in that case, there were reports that some of the enforcement misfired and were later reversed.

Instagram’s statement to Pop Base suggests that the platform will also make similar corrections, but they instead want users to verify themselves first.

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