Famous photo-sharing app Instagram has recently scrubbed multiple spam accounts and bots. As a result, many accounts of celebrities lost thousands or even millions of followers in just a few hours.

For example, Justin Bieber lost as many as 3.5 million followers, hip-hop star Akon – about 56% of his Instagram chums. Other artists also suffered: rappers Tyga and Ma$e lost 1.5 million followers. Kim Kardashian shed some 1.3 million followers. Of course, most of the celebrities and civilian Instagrammers didn’t like their free-falling follower count, but others reveled in the massacre.

The company explained that it had to delete accounts that posted links and spam – mostly bot accounts. As you know, online bots are nothing more than software apps that perform automated or semi-automated tasks. It should be noted that there are more bots out there than there are people on Earth.

You might have noticed the adverts of the companies that promised the opportunity to buy a bunch of followers on social networking websites like Twitter, Instagram and Vine so that you would seem more popular. They usually “sell” bot followers. As you can understand, their services are now a risky investment, because you can lose all of those “bought” followers overnight. In addition, Instagram’s latest move means that people making money from sponsored publications thanks to their large follower count also stand to lose out.

The photo-sharing app, owned by Facebook, recognized that spamming was a huge problem. Instagram said that after receiving feedback from members in the Instagram community, they had to fix an issue, which incorrectly included inactive accounts in follower/following lists. By the way, the Instagram’s own account lost the most followers – 18 million.