Yahoo Finance 'Instagram Rapture' claims millions of celebrity Instagram followers
As Instagram's crackdown on spam begins, distraught users have been begging the company to stop eliminating accounts.
As Instagram's crackdown on spam begins, distraught users have been begging the company to stop eliminating accounts.
Meanwhile, celebrity accounts have taken the biggest hit.
Popular Instagrammers like Kendall and Kylie Jenner have lost hundreds of thousands of followers, and many celebs have lost millions.
Justin Bieber's Instagram fan base plummeted by 3.5 million fans in the past 24 hours. Akon's follower count dropped to 1.9 million from 4.3 million.
Rapper Mase lost so many followers he decided to delete his account entirely. According to one Twitter user, Mase dropped to 100,000 followers from 1.6 million in a matter of 20 minutes.
The web developer Zach Allia created an infographic outlining the damage to Instagram's 100 most popular accounts, and celebrities have clearly been hit hardest.
"This Instagram bloodbath is hilarious," Josh "The Fat Jew" Ostrovsky, a popular Instagrammer with 2.2 million followers, told us.
"This should be a national holiday," he added. "We all know who bought followers, so today just corroborated everyone's suspicions. So many people losing their followers, watching their digital worlds crumble. Today is so fun."
Ben Baller, a jeweler to the stars, has also been relishing in the #InstagramRapture. He's been calling users out publicly on Twitter, where he has nearly 500,000 followers.
Not everyone shares his enthusiasm.
Thousands of people have been flooding the comments on Instagram's official account begging the service to reinstate their previous follower numbers.
In an email to Business Insider, an Instagram representative reiterated the service was simply removing deactivated spam accounts and accounts that violated its community guidelines.
"This guideline includes repetitive comments, as well as service manipulation in order to self-promote, and extends to commercial spam comments, such as discount codes or URLs to websites," the representative quoted from Instagram's guidelines.
"I'm sad to see the spam bots go," Ostrovsky says. "How will I know how to make money from home or who's [sic] page to check out to see the hottest models on Instagram?"
