The "Instagram Rapture"

Instagram began the process of deleting the millions of spam accounts that plague the service — reducing follower counts by as much as 15% in the process.

Business Insider called the event the “Instagram Rapture”.

Some celebrities lost millions of followers — Justin Bieber lost 3.5 million, or 15% of his total. The official Instagram account was hit hardest, losing more than 29% of its followers or 18.9% of its users.


In Nigeria, celebrities only lost a few thousands. Super star actress, Geneveive Nnaji who had over 400,00 followers now has about 320,000 followers left.

Those that remained flooded Instagram’s pictures with requests to put their follower counts back up. One picture, the work of an Australian photojournalist in covering the people of Afghanistan, was deluged with requests and hashtags demanding the accounts come back.

One user, rapper Ma$e, even seemed to have deleted his account after losing most of his followers. His 1.5 million followers plunged to 272,000 after the purge — prompting mocking comments from his remaining fans before he deleted the account entirely.

It’s possible that celebrities were hit harder than most people because they had bought the followers. Numerous websites across the internet offer the chance to be followed by fake accounts to boost numbers — even this morning sites were still offering 5,000 followers for $39.90.

The company announced last week that it had reached 300 million users and would start growing up — including purging the spam accounts that populated the service. (So many spam accounts have been deleted that it’s possible the number of users could have fallen back below that number.) It also said that it would introduce verified badges.


Source: MSN NEWS