Eli Lilly stocks drop after fake account leads people on

Claire Peterson on November 14, 2022

Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company, is the latest victim of a massive drop in stocks in recent days.

Since Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, there has been a shift in the social media platform.

Account legitimacy was the main topic of conversation for weeks.

Anyone can purchase the blue check mark, usually reserved for celebrities, politicians, and other figures.

Twitter was responsible for the decline in Eli Lilly’s stock.

The tweet

A fake Eli Lilly account managed to fool people after the user subscribed to Musk’s new Twitter Blue offer and gave himself the blue check mark tick.

The sight of the check mark made users believe the account’s misleading tweet.

“We are excited to announce insulin is free now,” said the fake Eli Lilly account.

Since the tweet, the account went private, losing its verification checkmark.

The insulin maker saw its stock price drop 4.5% hours after the tweet

Eli Lilly later clarified the situation with its official Twitter account.

The Twitter situation

The collapse of the pharmaceutical company is just one of the many problems that have arisen after the change of the Twitter Blue subscription offers.

Initially, people bought the service to impersonate athletes and celebrities before turning it into a breeding ground for other parody accounts and misinformation.

Although it has already appeared on Twitter, the new tick service has caused more confusion.

Many users have tried to get their accounts as close to the original as possible.

Elon Musk’s new Twitter Blue service only adds to the platform’s disinformation problem.

Eli Lilly and Company is just one of many corporate entities to fall victim to identity theft, along with others like:

Defense manufacturer Lockheed Martin
Oil company BP
Produce distributor Chiquita

Aftermath

Twitter enters a new era as more users use verification check marks to impersonate celebrities.

Users have also pointed to the unethical stories of the brands they imitate.

Shares of Eli Lilly and Company may have taken a hit, but the price of insulin for individuals remains very high.

Reference:

Insulin producer Eli Lilly sees stock drop because of a fake blue check tweet

Instagram locks out thousands of accounts

Edward Anderson on November 7, 2022

Instagram users woke up on Monday morning to a problem with the app as thousands of people were having trouble accessing their accounts.

Users were reporting that they couldn’t access their accounts.

Meanwhile, others that weren’t affected noticed a change in the follower count.

As a result, many accounts were unknowingly suspended.

The outage

During the outage, Instagram locked out several users from accessing their accounts, most of which received the same notification:

“We suspended your account on October 31, 2022.”

Most of the affected accounts were mainly iPhone users.

Additionally, the blocked users say their app would crash and become unusable before updates.

Down Detector

A troubleshooting website that tracks app or site outages called Down Detector learned about the Instagram situation.

According to Down Detector, more than 7,000 users were reporting that the app was inactive around 10 pm.

Within 45 minutes, the number of reports dropped significantly.

Instagram responds

The photo-sharing platform addressed the issue on Twitter at 10:14 in the evening.

“We’re aware that some of you are having issues accessing your Instagram account,” Instagram wrote.

“We’re looking into it and apologize for the inconvenience.”

The platform was eventually able to resolve the situation.

“We’ve resolved this bug now,” they announced at 6 pm.

“It was causing people in different parts of the world to have issues accessing their accounts and caused a temporary change for some in number of followers. Sorry!”

The head of the platform Adam Mosseri also sent his apologies on Twitter.

Follower loss

Manchester United striker and renowned athlete Cristiano Ronaldo is a prime example of how the outage cost him millions of fans.

Around 10 in the morning, the athlete lost over 3 million followers.

He had 493 million followers the day before.

However, the issue was resolved, and Ronaldo’s follower count was restored to 493 million.

Meanwhile, the main Instagram account was also down.

It lost more than a million followers.

References:

Instagram goes down for some users

Instagram fixes outage that told millions their accounts were suspended