How to See Who You’ve Requested to Follow on Instagram 2024

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How to see all sent follow requests

On Instagram, before you can follow any private account, you need to request it before you can follow. Instagram adds this extra step for private accounts so that they can decide who they want to follow them. The frustrating thing about private accounts is that the person can take however long they want to accept you, there’s no time limit as to when they can accept.

It’s quite unfortunate that Instagram doesn’t give you easy access to all of the requests that you’ve sent. Instead, they may it quite difficult and they only show you a list of people who have accepted your sent requests and these are your followers.

How to See Who You Requested to Follow on Instagram

Finding out your sent follow request history can come in very handy. You may have sent a follow request to someone but now they’ve changed their username and you can’t find their account anymore. If you a list of all of the accounts you’ve sent a request to, then you’d be able to find their account.

Android or iPhone

1. Go to the Instagram App

2. Click on your profile, then the Settings icon

3. Click ‘Security

4. Select Acces Data under Data and Security

5. Under ‘Connections’, click on ‘View all current follow requests

From here, you’ll be able to see a list of all your pending follow requests that are pending and haven’t been accepted yet. When they haven’t been accepted, they’ll stay on this list. When they are accepted, they go into your ‘following’ list.

Computer

  1. Go to Instagram.com
  2. Click on your profile, then the Settings icon
  3. Click ‘Privacy and security
  4. Under ‘Account data’, Click on ‘View account data
  5. Under ‘Connections’, click on ‘View all current follow requests

Instagram current follow requests

From here, you’ll be able to see a list of all your pending follow requests that are pending and haven’t been accepted yet. When they haven’t been accepted, they’ll stay on this list. When they are accepted, they go into your ‘following’ list.

https://www.instagram.com/accounts/access_tool/current_follow_requests

A quick way to check all of the accounts you’ve sent a follow request to is to visit https://www.instagram.com/accounts/access_tool/current_follow_requests. This will take you directly to the Instagram access tool where you’ll be able to see a list of all of the accounts you’ve ever sent a request to.

From here, you check their profile, of course only their bio or their profile picture. Or, you can cancel your request and exit their follow request section. The list is in chronological order so the most recent person you sent a follow request to will be at the top of the list. And the first person you sent a follow request to who hasn’t accepted it would be right at the bottom of the list.

To see the whole list of people you’ve sent a request to, you’ll have to click View More. Usually accounts at the bottom of the list no longer use their account which is why they haven’t been able to accept your request.

Go Through Your Likes

Rather than viewing all of your current follow requests in the privacy and security section on your PC or phone, you can simply go through your likes and comments. This is a good place to find a collection of people that you could’ve potentially requested. Although most people in here would comprise of people you either follow or people you used to follow, it’s one the best places to find a batch of people that you could’ve requested.

On top of this, you could also check your comment section to see if there’s anyone that you could’ve requested in here who for some reason just hasn’t accepted your request. Because they liked your posts, they’re less likely to not accept your request.

Go Through Someone’s Accounts

Another way to come across some accounts that you could’ve requested rather than going to the current follow request section in privacy and security is to look at a mutual friend’s account. In a mutual friend’s account, you’re likely to see a ton of people that you’ve requested to follow.

Another thing people tend to do is that they go to someone’s following or followers and try to follow everyone there to get more followers. If this is something you do, then chances are that you’ll find a ton of people that you’ve sent follow requests to in this list. If you’ve recently been sending out friend requests, you’re going to see a lot more people on this list. If you haven’t been sending out friend requests recently, then

They May Have Went Public With Their Account or Accepted

However, you’re trying to find follow requests that you’ve sent, if you’re unable to see that many, chances are that they’ve either gone public with their account and you’ve been accepted by default, or they’ve accepted the request. You should know that your request has been accepted because you’ll see that you’re following them if you go to the following list. Your followings list is also another good place to find requests, accepted once that is. You’ll have to sort the followings list by chronological order to see people that you’ve recently started following. This will show you who you’ve requested recently requested to follow.

They Couldn’ve Cancelled The Request

You may not see the follow requests that you’re looking for and that’s simply because they’ve canceled the request. You may be checking the current requests section and not finding accounts that you thought would’ve been there – this may be because they canceled their follow request. In this case, if you’ve forgotten their username, chances of you finding them again will be low because they won’t have the requested button.

How to Cancel All Sent Follow Requests on Instagram

Or, you may just want to cancel all of the friend requests you’ve ever sent on Instagram. This can come in handy if you don’t want any future requests being accepted, or you don’t want to remain in the person’s list of all the people requesting them. Canceling your request after a while might seem like the best option for you since staying in their requests can feel embarrassing.

Cancel Instagram request

If you want to cancel all of the requests you’ve sent on Instagram, on the list of all of the requests, you need to copy and paste the names you want to cancel the requests for and paste them into the Instagram search bar. From here, you can just click ‘Requested’ on their profile to cancel the request you sent.

To know if this has been successfully done, the Requested button should go from Requested, to Follow. From here, you can make the decision to follow their account and wait for your request to be accepted, or you can cancel your request outright.

If you know that you have sent a follow request and you can’t see it on the current requests list, this means that the person either blocked you, canceled the request (most likely), or they have deleted their account.

Can You Cancel All Sent Follow Requests on Instagram?

Unfortunately, there’s no way that you can cancel all of the pending requests at once. There’s no option that will allow you to remove all of the current requests you have now and remove yours from their requests section. The only way to cancel all of the accounts you’ve requested is to manually go through the pending follow requests list and cancel your request one by one by using the search bar.

There are no apps that will allow you to cancel all of your follow requests at once, you’ll have to do everything manually in the current follow requests list. Instagram doesn’t make it possible for any app to grab this data so you’ll find nothing on the market that will allow you to automatically cancel all of your sent follow requests.

How to See Deleted Follow Requests on Instagram

If you have people requesting to follow you and you’ve decided to delete their follow request because you didn’t want them to follow you, sometimes you may want to turn the decision around. It’s very easy to delete a follow request since the Confirm button is right next to the Delete button.

There’s no way to see all of the sent requests that you’ve deleted. Instagram doesn’t store a list of all of the requests you’ve deleted; once you delete a request, it’s gone forever. The only way you can find deleted follow requests is if you remember the people who deleted your follow request and you decided to search their name using the search function.

If you want someone to follow you after you’ve deleted their request, the first option is to follow them again so that they will accept your request and you can follow them back, however you may not want to follow them first.

If you don’t want to request their account, but you want them to request you again so you can confirm their request, you can either message them to follow you again, which might seem like a strange request, or you can wait for them to send you a follow request so that you can confirm it rather than delete it.

When You Request to Follow Someone, Why Does it Say Requested And Then Goes Back to Follow?

This doesn’t mean they blocked you, it simply means that they canceled your follow request. They may have not wanted you to follow them so they could have just canceled the request. You’d have to send the request again if you want them to accept it. If they did block you, you wouldn’t be able to find their account in the first place.

David Johnson is a freelance writer with 9 years of experience writing for Techzillo and other established tech outlets like iMore. His focus and key interests are Apple and accessibility as well as consumer technology in general. Read our Editorial Guidlines and Fact Checking process.

23 COMMENTS

  1. Hello:) Firstly, you are super helpful thank you!!
    I was wondering if you know a solution to zoom in on my already uploaded pictures
    I dont want to change the pictures just zoom on them in the grid view
    I mean on those ones which has a white frame which i made with instasize
    Sadly it ruins the general impression of my instagram and it would be reeealy awesome to fix my younger selfes mistake

  2. Hi there do you know if there is a way to see a friend request you accepted around a month and a half ago but since you accepted they have now deleted you? THANKS

  3. It seems either this feature no longer exists or is not available to iOS users anymore? Jesus, what a load of crap! How can an app be so shitty?

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