Facebook follower numbers are dropping mysteriously, but why?

People across the country are waking up this morning to find their follower counts (and their Page counts, for many) mysteriously cut in half or less.

Due to a mistake on Facebook, millions of people's followers disappeared overnight. Not even Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has survived this storm of bugs.

Even Mark Zuckerberg's follower count has dropped from nearly 100 million to just 9,993 overnight. Many suspect a bug in the platform.

Many other users have also complained about the sudden loss of followers. This is said to be a result of the depletion of fake followers, thus begging the question of whether all of Mark Zuckerberg's followers were also fake.

Facebook follower numbers are dropping

Meta recently introduced the high-end reality headset, which Mark Zuckerberg also shared on his Facebook page. The new headset has been called the Meta Quest Pro and its price has been kept at $1,500. This headset will also track natural facial expressions.

According to data from analytics platforms, CrowdTangle, The New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, The Hill, USA Today, New York Post and Newsweek all saw a decline in followers on October 3 and 4.

Facebook says on its Transparency Center pages: "Our goal is to remove as many fake accounts on Facebook as we can. These include accounts created with the malicious intent to violate our policies, and personal profiles created to represent a business, organization, or non-human entity."

"We prioritize law enforcement against fake accounts that seek to cause harm. Many of these accounts are used in spam campaigns and are financially motivated.

Facebook, on its Transparency Center pages, states: "Our goal is to remove as many fake accounts on Facebook as we can. These include accounts created with malicious intent to violate our policies and personal profiles created to represent a business, organization, or non-human entity, such as a pet.

"We prioritize enforcement against fake accounts that seek to cause harm. Many of these accounts are used in spam campaigns and are financially motivated.

"We expect the number of accounts we action to vary over time due to the unpredictable nature of adversarial account creation. Our detection technology helps us block millions of attempts to create fake accounts every day and detect millions more, often within minutes after creation. We do not include blocked attempts in the metrics we report here."

Between April and June this year, Facebook estimated that "fake accounts represented approximately 5 percent of our worldwide monthly active users."

Meanwhile, a dispute over fake accounts has recently cast doubt on Elon Musk's $44 billion deal to purchase Twitter. In May, the Tesla CEO cited an audit claiming that half of President Joe Biden's Twitter followers were either spam or bot accounts. Musk attempted to withdraw from the acquisition in July, leading Twitter to file a lawsuit for breach of contract.

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