Lost followers on Instagram? Find out who

How it works

1. 1

   Request an export today

   Open Instagram → your profile → menu (☰) → Settings and privacy → Accounts Centre → Your information and permissions → Export your information → Create export. Tick only Followers and following, set the date range to All time, pick JSON, and choose Download to device.

2. 2

   Download and keep the ZIP

   Instagram emails a link when the file is ready, usually within 10–20 minutes for a followers-only export. The link works for 4 days, so download the ZIP promptly and keep it — renaming it with the date (for example instagram-2026-10-12.zip) makes later comparisons easier.

3. 3

   Request a second export later

   Come back in a week or a month and repeat step 1. If an older ZIP from a previous export is already sitting in your downloads, you can skip the wait and use that as the older file.

4. 4

   Upload both exports

   Drop the earlier ZIP into Older export and the later one into Newer export, then press Compare the two exports. Both resulting lists — who unfollowed you and who newly followed you — are shown in full, free, with CSV downloads. Nothing is uploaded; the comparison runs in your browser.

Three reasons your count dropped overnight

Follower counts fall for three reasons, and they feel identical from the outside. The first is a cleanup: Instagram periodically removes accounts it has decided are bots or spam, and if any of them followed you, your number drops in a single step. The second is people choosing to leave — after a post, a story, a change in what you share, or a tidy-up of who they follow. The third is deactivation, which is temporary and sometimes reverses a week later when the person comes back.

Your profile shows one number for all three. Professional accounts get a daily unfollow total in Insights, which tells you when but still not who. The follower-count guide goes through the patterns in detail; this page is about getting names.

Telling a purge from real unfollows

Once you have the list of lost accounts, the character of the drop is usually plain. A purge list is full of number-heavy usernames with no obvious connection to you and follow dates clustered in a short window — they followed in bulk and were removed in bulk. A list of real unfollows looks like people: recognisable names, varied follow dates, often a few accounts you interact with. Tap through to a profile from the CSV and a purged or deactivated account shows an empty or unavailable page, while a real unfollower's profile is alive and posting.

The export itself does not label the cause, and this tool won't pretend otherwise. What it gives you is the raw list with dates, which is enough to sort it yourself in a minute.

Getting names, not just a number

You need two exports: one from before the drop and one from after. If you already have an older ZIP, request a fresh one now, and when it arrives drop the old file into Older export, the new one into Newer export, and press Compare the two exports. The heading tells you how many accounts unfollowed you; the unfollowed you tab lists every one, in full, free, and Export CSV saves them as unfollowed_you.csv with a Date They Followed You column.

If you have no earlier export, the drop you just noticed can't be named — nothing safe can reconstruct a followers list from the past. Request an export today anyway; it becomes the baseline so the next drop is answerable. The general who unfollowed me page explains the method from scratch.

Reading the follow dates on the lost list

The Date They Followed You column is the most useful thing on the lost list, so sort by it. Accounts that followed you years ago and have now left are usually a real signal: a long-time follower decided your account no longer fits their feed. Accounts that followed last week and left this week are the follow-for-follow crowd — they followed hoping you'd follow back, didn't get it, and moved on. Neither is worth losing sleep over, but they mean different things, and only the dates separate them.

The same comparison has a second tab, new followers, for the accounts that arrived in the same window. The net change is often much smaller than the drop suggests.

What to do after a drop

Mostly: nothing dramatic. If the list is a bot purge, your real audience is unchanged and your engagement rate just improved. If it's people, look at what you posted between the two export dates — the reasons people unfollow are well understood and rarely personal. Don't follow-and-unfollow the leavers to get their attention; it doesn't work and it burns through Instagram's daily action limits.

If you'd rather watch this over time than once, the unfollowers tracker page describes a monthly export routine. And if a drop has made you curious about who still follows you that you've never followed back, the fans list comes from a single export.

What this tool can't tell you

It can't tell you why an account left, whether it was a person or a bot, or whether a deactivation will reverse. It can't recover lost followers or contact them. It can't name losses from before your oldest export. And it can't see anyone else's account — only exports you request from your own. Two of your own files, compared on your device, free: that's the scope.

Frequently asked questions