5 Most Viral Instagram Posts Ever

Instagram allows us to simply share a photo with a caption and it can be seen by millions of people around the world. It’s an extremely useful app for those that don’t want to read too much into backstories and simply enjoy photos for what they are. Over the history of Instagram, there have been several posts to garner tens of millions of likes, with these five going more viral than any other.

For this list, we wanted to make sure that we only got one Instagram post per user. The 2022 World Cup saw the top of the list get filled up by many posts from Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, so we’re taking just the top one from each player.

Ariana Grande Gets Married

Singer Ariana Grande has had a ton of hits throughout her illustrious career including “7 Rings”, “Thank U, Next” and “Bang Bang”. The amount of success she was able to achieve before turning 30 was remarkable, though perhaps her best day came on May 15, 2021. It was on that day that Grande married real estate agent Dalton Gomez.

For Grande, it was the first time that she was in a relationship with someone who wasn’t a celebrity, so many people didn’t even know that she was getting married. Donning a Vera Wang dress, Grande posted an album of her wedding on Instagram and it became one of the most-liked posts in Instagram’s history.

The Last XXXTentacion Post

XXXTentacion got his music career off the ground in his early teenage years when he was releasing his tracks on Soundcloud. By the time he was in his late teens, he had developed a large following thanks to his song “Look at Me” from his debut album “17”. Born Jahseh Onfoy, XXXTentacion had a lot of personal problems, and sadly only lived to be 20 years old.

On May 19, 2018, XXXTentacion posted what would end up being his final photo on Instagram. The photo was simply of him shirtless and upside down with the caption “LOVE IS WAR”. Almost exactly one month later, XXXTentacion was murdered in broad daylight in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Many went back to his last post to like it as it became a piece of history.

Ronaldo’s Advertised Chess Match

We now get to the soccer portion of the list as Cristiano Ronaldo has dominated a good portion of the list of most-liked Instagram posts ever. Ronaldo’s most popular post of all time, though, is simply an advertisement that he posted in November 2022. The photo shows Ronaldo playing a game of chess on top of a Louis Vuitton case that resembles a chess board.

The caption makes it so that people are fooled and states that it’s an advertisement from a photoshoot. “Victory is a State of Mind,” Ronaldo said. “A long tradition of crafting trunks photographed by (Annie Leibovitz) for (Louis Vuitton).” What made it so popular is that it took two legends of the sport and put them together, with celebrities instantly calling it one of the most iconic pictures in sports history. 

The Egg

On January 4, 2019, a man named Chris Godfrey set out to have the most-liked post on Instagram and wanted things to be very simple. He posted a photo of an egg with a white background and nothing more. Godfrey named the account world_record_egg and it would be the account’s only post.

Godfrey succeeded in his mission as the egg became the most-liked post within weeks, destroying the previous record of 18 million. The caption said “Let’s set a world record together and get the most liked post on Instagram. Beating the current world record held by Kylie Jenner (18 million)! We got this.” Naturally, everyone wanted to be part of history and started liking the egg photo tens of millions of times over.

Messi Becomes the GOAT

We had already mentioned soccer legends and Lionel Messi, and now we get to both his top post and the top post in Instagram history. There had been one accomplishment that Messi was searching for in his illustrious career, and that was winning the World Cup for his native Argentina. Messi did just that with a huge game in the finals of the 2022 event.

Shortly after winning the title, Messi took to Instagram, posting an album of his team celebrating while he holds the prestigious trophy. When translated to English, the post reads “Champions of the world! So many times I dreamed it, so much I wanted it that I still don’t fall, I can’t believe it…Thank you so much to my family, to all who support me and also to all who believed in us.”