{
  "id": 19892879,
  "title": "How Instagram's September 2026 Change Broke Follow Trackers (and How Snapshot Diffing Works)",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/11/14/how-instagrams-september-2026-change-broke-follow-trackers-and-how",
  "topic": "culture",
  "section": "Culture",
  "published": "2026-11-14T00:43:34.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/sarah_mitchell_ig/how-instagrams-september-2026-change-broke-follow-trackers-and-how-snapshot-diffing-works-2bl2"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "On 9 September 2026, Instagram underwent a change that broke recent follows trackers worldwide. Previously, these tools relied on Instagram returning a Following list ordered with the newest follows at the top. However, after the change, the list began ranking the follows instead, causing trackers to display incorrect results. This post explains the new order, why the old model failed, and how snapshot diffing works to overcome the issue. The author, who works on Klupt, a tracker that broke on that day, provides code examples and highlights six common bugs to watch out for when implementing a similar solution.",
  "summary": "For years, every \"recent follows\" tracker on the internet was built on one quiet assumption: Instagram returns a Following list newest first. If you wanted to know who someone followed last, you fetched their list and read the top. On 9 September 2026, that assumption broke. There was no announcement and no changelog. A whole category of tools just started showing wrong results on the same…",
  "key_points": [
    "Instagram changed follow list order on 9 September 2026",
    "Follow trackers relied on newest follows at top",
    "Snapshot diffing solves incorrect results issue"
  ],
  "editors_take": "Instagram's shift from chronological to ranked lists forces developers to abandon simple list scraping in favor of snapshot diffing to maintain accurate user following data.",
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}