In early May 2026, one of the most followed people on the planet appeared to lose millions of followers in only a few days. Cristiano Ronaldo's Instagram audience fell from roughly 673 million to about 666 million, while Lionel Messi dropped from around 512 million to about 507 million. The change was not caused by a scandal, a bad match, or a public argument. It was the result of a large platform clean-up, sometimes called by users "the great purge," in which the social netw

In May 2026, many of the world's most-followed social media accounts woke up to smaller numbers. During a large cleanup that users online called the "Great Purge of 2026," Instagram's parent company removed millions of fake, bot, and inactive accounts. Cristiano Ronaldo, long the most-followed person on the platform, saw a widely reported drop of several million followers in a matter of hours, and analytics trackers recorded a cumulative decline of more than nine million over