Users on the LinkedIn platform this Tuesday began noticing a problem with their follower counts: They were dropping rapidly, and sometimes by many hundreds of users at once. Given the lack of official word from LinkedIn at the time, many made speculative guesses that the situation was due to LinkedIn purging fake accounts from the platform.

Some even issued dictums on the issue, stating that the problem arose because the company decided to purge the false, inactive, or duplicate accounts. Others used the chance to float their supposed credibility on the grounds of being able to help LinkedIn users avoid having their accounts banned. Still more queried what they could have done wrong to experience such a loss in the accounts so quickly.

While such general consensus was that this was a purge released by LinkedIn, the company came out at the tail end of the day stating it had investigated the matter and has "resolved" the issue. It did not explain what it caused.

This is what the company said in a post on X. We just became aware that some members might have noticed a change to their connection and follower count. The issue has been looked at by our team right away, and we're pleased to report this matter has been resolved.

Reached for comment, LinkedIn only pointed us to its Status page, where, on Tuesday morning at 6:00 a.m. ET, it said "some members were reporting issues with their follower and connection count, which we are investigating further." Indeed, the company then marked the problem as resolved on Tuesday afternoon, at 1:00 p.m. ET.

Users would still be thinking that the problem resulted from a purge. Social networks like X have been running purges on spammers, bots, and inactive accounts many times.

But since LinkedIn's network is more about building up your perceived relevance and clout in your industry, a loss in followers would have been disastrous to those who rely on their profile to market themselves or their businesses, as well as those who do such work on behalf of clients.

The following point is that the incident blew up partly because LinkedIn failed to address the problem on either its self-service LinkedIn account or its X account-that is, the latter, which hasn't been updated since May of last year.