Did you survive the rapture? Millions of Justin Bieber’s “friends” did not. The popular social media site Instagram, cleaned house yesterday deleting millions of inactive, fake or spam accounts in its web service.

Earlier this year the popular social media site announced it was planning this unprecedented move. What is being dubbed the “Instagram rapture” resulted in the deletion of more than 18 million user accounts.

Zach Allia, a software developer for Instagram, created a list of the top 100 accounts that lost the most followers during the Instagram rapture. Allia said by using figures taken from Instagrams API it took him approximately 20 minutes to comprise his list.

The reasoning behind the deletion of accounts was to free up user names on inactive accounts, and to clean out spambot accounts.

There were also a large number of fake user accounts. What has become a lucrative business in the social media world is purchasing “followers” to boost one’s social media status.

Companies like Foxfans and Buzzoid sell You Tube hits to make a video go viral, and “followers” for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. “Friends” do come cheap though, the going rate is about three dollars for 100 “followers”.

The ordinary person on the street will probably not see too much of a difference in the number of followers though. The hardest hit over the Instagram rapture was Hollywood celebrities, some losing millions of “followers”.

This points to the fact that many celebrities have been caught red-handed boosting their on line popularity with imaginary friends.

The biggest hits taken by celebrities from the Instagram rapture was 37-year old rapper Mase. His followers tumbled dramatically from 1.6 million to 100,000. It appears he may have been too embarrassed by the idea that everyone knew he’d bought all those followers, Mase quickly deleted his account.

Rapper Tyga lost half of his followers, plummeting from 5.5 million to 2.2 million. Akon lost 2.4 million, just over 56% of his followers. Justin Bieber’s friend count went down by 3.5 million, Kim Kardashian lost 1.3 million, and P.Diddy, also known as Sean Combs, lost more than 3.6 million followers.

The biggest individual loss of imaginary friends in the Instagram rapture came from the account chiragchirag78, which came crashing down from more than 3.6 million followers, to just eight, this account was later deleted.

Instagram was quick to point out that even with the deletion of the 18 million of its own users, which takes it total user count down to 45.2 million, it is still more popular than its primary competitor, Twitter. It can be assumed that because of the many companies selling fake followers, all the spam accounts, and inactive accounts, if other popular social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter were to do a similar purge, those social media sites would have similar losses in users. Twitter,however, claims that if they were to do a similar house cleaning they would lose only approximately 5% of their user accounts.

Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, said that more than 70 million photos and videos are shared by its members every day, and that more than 300 million people use the social media app each month.