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Next time you log into Instagram, you may notice your follower numbers have taken a hit.

Instagram is clamping down on fake, inactive and spam accounts by completely removing them from the service.

The Facebook-owned app announced the plans earlier this year, and began purging the unwanted accounts last night. 

Celebrities, in particular, were the biggest victim of what's been dubbed Instagram Rapture after losing millions of followers overnight. 

Software developer Zach Allia created a list of the top 100 accounts that lost the most followers during the update. 

He told MailOnline the figures were taken from Instagram's API and it took him just 20 minutes to compile the list. 


The biggest loser was an account called chiragchirag78, which dropped from more than 3.6 million followers yesterday, to just eight. 

However, the owner of this account is not known, and it has since been removed.

The biggest celebrity loser was Akon, who shedded more than 2.4 million, or just over 56 per cent, of his followers. 

Bruno Mars lost 24 per cent of his followers in the purge, while rapper P.Diddy, also known as Sean Combs and on Instagram as iamdiddy, lost more than 3.6 million followers - or 22 per cent. 

Justin Bieber's count went down by 3.5 million, while Kim Kardashian lost 1.3 million.

And Instagram's own account didn't escape the so-called rapture, losing more than 18.8 million followers, to take its total down to 45.2 million.  


Instagram did warn users it was planning to clampdown on spam account earlier in the year.

In an official blog, the photo-sharing app said: 'In December 2014, we're fixing an ongoing issue that incorrectly includes inactive or fake accounts in follower/following lists.

'We want to maintain the best possible experience on Instagram, so we do our best to remove spam, fake accounts and other people and posts that don't follow our Community Guidelines.

'As we remove these accounts, some people may notice a decrease in their follower/following counts.'
This issue had been fixed for the majority of Instagrammers in April, but this month's update expanded it to the remaining users. 

 'When we remove accounts from Instagram that don't follow our Community Guidelines, you may see a decrease in your follower count,' the firm added.

'This shouldn’t affect engagement from authentic accounts that like and comment on your posts.' 

Earlier this month, Instagram announced that more than 300 million people use the app each month - making it more popular than Twitter.

Just nine months after hitting 200 million users, Instagram overtook Twitter, which said six week ago it had 284 million users.

The site, owned by Facebook, also revealed more than 70 million photos and videos are shared by its members every day. 

The removal of the fake and inactive accounts does not affect this figure, and they were not included in the 300 million. 


Source: Daily Mail UK

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