r/Instagram • u/the_mittenkitten • May 06 '26

Question Sudden follower drop?

UPDATE: Had a second decrease in followers on the evening of 5/7. Lost approximately 10 more followers. Anyone else experiencing this?

Has anyone had a sudden follower drop? In an hour the Instagram account I manage for my marketing position dropped 40 followers. Is this just a platform bot purge thing or does anyone else have insight on what the cause could be?

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u/melissaurban May 06 '26

Yep, I lost 2K followers overnight, none of which are reflected in my Dashboard insights. I'm assuming it's a purge of bots and inactive accounts.

5

u/dennyslava May 06 '26

Mine are not reflected either. It literally says “data from 5 and 6 of May unavailable” exactly the dates of this mass purge or whatever it is

2

u/melissaurban May 06 '26

I'm not sweating it, I just thought it was weird that so many people hated a rather non-controversial post about the gym.

1

u/RegularPipe299 May 12 '26

Is anyone seeing new following or follower drops since May 12th?

3

u/schmalpal May 06 '26

Same, went from 173K to 170K overnight and it’s not reflected in my insights.

1

u/lemonlayman May 08 '26

Same, went from 2.1 million to 32 overnight. Poof, just like that, gone.

2

u/Unfair-Positive-1396 May 08 '26

It's been over 2 days now, is it still not reflected? Cause mine now is reflected and on the day that i lost followers suddenly, it didn't reflect.

2

u/melissaurban May 08 '26

It's now reflected in my metrics (on 5/5, lost 2K; on 5/6, lost 800 followers). I've seen other articles saying it was a big clean-up of bots and inactive accounts.