Justin Bieber just lost 3.5M Instagram followers

Celebrity fame has been the victim of an Instagram purge.

CNN reports that Instagram, owned by Facebook (NYSE: FB), shed more than 18.8 million followers, or nearly 30 percent of its total, in a purge of spam accounts last week.

Celebrities such as Justin Bieber paid the price. The Biebs lost 3.5 million followers in one day, about 15 percent of his total followers. And he wasn’t the only one. Some of the Internet’s biggest names lost a large slice of the Instagram pie.

CNN reports Ariana Grande lost 1.5 million followers, Kim Kardashian lost 1.3 million and Rihanna shed more than 1.1 million followers, spelling bad news for the celebs who promote brands via filtered photos. Accounts with large followings can score big bucks from advertisers.

Instagram reports post purge, it has roughly 300 million users.

Read more from CNN.