Cristiano Ronaldo loses 3m Instagram followers amid outage

The most influential footballer on Instagram, Cristiano Ronaldo lost three million followers during an outage on the social media platform on Monday.

A glitch on the platform saw accounts lose a significant number of followers during the outage as numbers plummeted across the site. Ronaldo – who has amassed a remarkable 493million followers on the platform – saw this drop by three million as the bug hit numbers, Mirror UK reported.

The drop in follower counts remains unclear although it is believed that it may have been connected to a bug that caused millions of accounts to be suspended. However, an app update rolled out for Instagram on iOS may have caused the issue.

Instagram subsequently claimed that the social media giant had fixed the software bug which prevented users from accessing the platform but did not clarify the exact cause of the issues, or why follower counts had dropped so significantly.

Ronaldo’s three million drop in followers – which since appears to have been restored to his count – appears to be the most of any celebrity. The platform’s most followed woman Kylie Jenner saw 1.1million followers lost, while Kim Kardashian lost over 749,000 followers, and Taylor Swift’s count dropped by 674,000.

Despite diminishing returns with his on-pitch performance – unsurprisingly, as he is now just three months away from celebrating his 38th birthday in a career that has spanned two decades – Ronaldo remains an iconic figure having become one of the world’s best players during his first spell at United and with Real Madrid.

The Portuguese superstar netted a scarcely believable club record 450 goals in 438 first-team appearances for the Spanish giants and has netted over 700 goals at club level and is the only player in the world to have scored more than 100 goals for his international team.

According to research from analysts Nielsen Gracenote (via BBC ), the Portugal captain’s social media following grew by 48 per cent over the past year. The 37-year-old averages more than £3million in media value per post according to the analysis. The forward has 480 million followers on Instagram and regularly posts updates from matches and training on the platform, as well as advertising promotions.

His giant following is 80 million more than that of his rival Lionel Messi – who is second in the list of football followers numbers on the platform. The Argentine superstar has seen his own following grow by 38 per cent over the past 12 months, but it is still well short of Ronaldo’s.