Hello and welcome to this news story about an important egg.

Here’s what happened: a picture of an egg, just an egg, was uploaded to Instagram on Jan. 4 with one goal: to become the most liked post on the platform, ever. Its competition? Kylie Jenner’s birth announcement. Ten days later, we can report that the egg has done it.

Picture of a brand new human child from one of the most #liked families on the Internet? Eighteen million likes. A picture of an egg? Twenty-eight million likes and counting.

The egg won. It’s just an egg.

We reached out to the egg’s managers – the “Egg Gang” – for comment on their achievement. An associate for the egg — identifying themselves only as someone living in London – replied by email that they came up with the idea on January 4th, the first Friday night of their Dry January. “I was sitting at home reading an article online about the top 20 Instagram posts of 2018.” they said.

“I thought it would be an interesting experiment to try and beat the record with something as basic as possible. Which led to me deciding on the egg. I guess it’s also a comment on celebrity culture and how fragile and easily cracked it is (pun intended),” They added.

The campaign started off slowly, with under 10,000 likes by Tuesday. Then, the egg gained momentum. The anonymous person behind it said they were still trying to work out how, exactly, the egg achieved its dream.

The egg’s Instagram story also contains a brief statement.

“This is madness, What a time to be alive.” The Egg Gang also promises this isn’t the last you will hear of Egg.

Meanwhile, Jenner responded to the egg on Instagram by cracking one of its family members onto the hot pavement, commenting, “Take that, little egg.”

The world’s (short) history of viral social media posts is full of unexplained phenomena like Egg. In 2017, a teen managed to unseat Ellen DeGeneres’ Oscars selfie as the most retweeted tweet of all time with . . . a plea for free chicken nuggets to Wendy’s brand account. A Japanese billionaire unseated the chicken nugget tweet last week with a tweet promising to give away a bunch of money to 100 people who retweeted him.

The Egg also has more than 1 million comments on the actual post, along with many more swarms of egg emojis posted to Jenner’s more recent Instagram photos. Egg supporters were celebrating news coverage of Egg, making a ton of puns about “beating” the record and demanding that the egg attempt to conquer other social media records too.

In an update to their Instagram story on Monday morning, the mysterious Egg Gang revealed the, perhaps, inevitable next step for an extremely viral egg: Egg Gang merch is dropping soon.


Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.

Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.