Football superstars Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi shocked fans after suddenly losing millions of followers on Instagram within just a few hours.
The dramatic drop was not caused by controversy or negative fan reactions.
Instead, reports suggest it happened after Instagram carried out a massive cleanup operation targeting fake profiles, inactive pages, and bot accounts across the platform.
According to social media tracking pages, Ronaldo lost more than eight million followers overnight, dropping from 674 million followers to 666 million.
Meanwhile, Messi’s account reportedly fell by more than five million followers, going from 512 million to around 507 million.
Despite the huge numbers, both football icons remain among the most-followed people in the world on Instagram.
If anything, the purge highlighted just how many fake accounts follow celebrities and major public figures.
Social media platforms regularly remove suspicious or automated accounts in an effort to improve authenticity and engagement accuracy, but the scale of Instagram’s latest cleanup surprised many users online.