Why did I lose followers on X (Twitter)?

When a follower disappears from one of our users' lists, we look the account up before we report anything. The chart shows what we found.

These numbers come from the accounts we track, most of them under 2,000 followers. If yours is much bigger and got caught in one of X's bot purges, your split may look different.

Your count also mixes losses with new followers. Say you had 3,480 followers on Monday and 3,474 on Friday. Six fewer can be eight accounts gone and two new ones.

X removes bots all the time. Its latest report, as of October 2026, covers July to December 2024 and counts more than 335 million accounts suspended for spam and platform manipulation. What bot followers look like, and how to remove the ones X misses, is in how to spot and remove bot followers.

Now and then X says so in public. In April 2024 its @Safety account announced a sweep against spam accounts and warned of changes in follower counts. In April 2026 its head of product wrote that X was suspending 208 bots a minute. X has published no schedule for these purges.

If those accounts followed you, your count goes down with them. In our data, 23% of the follower losses were accounts suspended by X. X's help pages don't say outright that suspended accounts leave your count, only that locked ones do. X locks an account that looks automated or seems to have been compromised until its owner confirms by phone, email or a captcha, and locked accounts are removed from every follower count.

That rule dates from July 2018. Twitter's announcement said most people would see a change of four followers or fewer, and that most of the locked accounts had been created by real people who might no longer control them. Big accounts lost more: in the Wayback Machine snapshots Fortune checked, Barack Obama went from 104 million followers on 11 July to 101 million two days later.

Real people get caught too. X's page on suspended accounts says that most of them are spam or fake, that X sometimes suspends a real person by mistake and then lifts the suspension, and that there's an appeal.

No. X's own help page on following issues has a section called "My follower count is wrong". It gives three reasons why a follower you were notified about is missing: they unfollowed, they deactivated their account, or the account is hidden for spam.

When someone deactivates, X keeps the account for 30 days, and one login during that time brings it back. After 30 days without a login it's deleted for good, and X says the username becomes available to others.

So some of these followers return. About a third of the followers we recorded as deleted came back later (1,016 of 2,963): they had only deactivated. Your dashboard says "deleted their account" for both, and "is back on X and follows you again" when one returns.

That leaves the people who did unfollow, and we can't see why any of them left. Our numbers only show who does it. Two out of three unfollows came from accounts our users didn't follow back, and 70% of the accounts that unfollowed follow more people than follow them. The rest is in why people unfollow on X.

Few come back. Of the 1,874 unfollows we recorded in September 2026, 28 were followed by the same account following again by 11 October.

Blocking ends the follow in both directions. Block someone who follows you and you lose a follower. The same happens when a follower blocks you, and X sends no notification for a block. There's a separate guide on how to tell whether someone blocked you.

Removing a follower does it too. On the web, X has a "Remove this follower" option, as of October 2026.

You need the names first. They come from comparing your follower list before and after, so without a copy from before, you can't get the names behind the drop you've just seen. That's true for us too: we can't show you anyone who left before your first scan. For the next drop, you can do it by hand with two copies of the list, or look at every way to see who unfollowed you.

Then open each profile. The last column is how we word it when we do this for you.

To have us do it, click "Connect with X" and follow @unfollowmonkey, because X may refuse our DMs unless you follow us. We save your follower list, and at every check we compare it with a fresh one, look up each account that's gone and DM you its name with what happened. Free accounts (under 2,000 followers) are checked once a month, Chimp Max accounts once a week, and the other paid plans every day or more often.

UnfollowMonkey

@your_ex unfollowed you 🙈 💔

They followed you for about 3 years.

@moon_signals_88 got suspended 😱

The date on your dashboard is the day our check found the account gone, which on Free can be up to a month after it left. And a block looks like an unfollow to us, so we can't tell you who blocked you.