Why does scraping followers count from instagram fails?

I'm trying to scrape the number of followers of an array of username. I'm using BeautifulSoup.

The code I'm using is the following

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

def instagram_followers(username):
    headers = {
        'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.3'
    }
    response = requests.get(f'https://www.instagram.com/{username}/')
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
    info = soup.find('meta', property='og:description')
    if info:
        followers = info['content'].split(" ")[0]
        return followers
    else:
        return -1

The function always returns -1

Code works fine in focus of your question, so issue is not reproducable, without any additional information.

Check following:

• response.status_code as first indicator, may you scrape to aggressivly and the server will handle this by blocking your ip.
• also implement your headers, they are not used in your code

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

def instagram_followers(username):
    headers = {
        'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.3'
    }
    response = requests.get(f'https://www.instagram.com/{username}/', headers=headers)
    if response.status_code == 200:
        soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')
        info = soup.find('meta', property='og:description')
        if info:
            followers = info['content'].split(" ")[0]
            return followers
        else:
            return -1
    else:
        print('Something went wrong with your request: ' + response.status_code)
    
instagram_followers('thestackoverflow')

Output:

52K