T-Pain missed years of Instagram DMs from Viola Davis, Fergie, and dozens of other celebrities, a viral TikTok showed

• T-Pain posted a TikTok video showing years of unread Instagram messages.
• He said in the video that he didn't know Instagram message requests went to a separate folder.
• There were unread messages from accounts belonging to Viola Davis and Diplo, among others.

T-Pain posted a video on his TikTok account Wednesday showing a massive scroll of unread Instagram direct messages from accounts belonging to Fergie, Viola Davis, and YBN Nahmir, among other accounts. In the video, the rapper said that he wasn't aware of Instagram's message-request feature, thus leaving what appear to be years worth of messages unread.

On Instagram, messages from users who you don't follow are sent to a requests folder that is separate from your main direct message inbox. In order to access them, you're required to navigate to a separate page where you can choose whether or not to accept the request. If you're unaware of the requests folder, it can be easy to miss.

"I was today years old when I found out about the request folder on Instagram that's full of celebs trying to reach me," read on-screen text with an automated voice-over, as T-Pain scrolled through unread messages.

Some of the messages were timestamped to as recent as five days ago, while others appeared to have been sent over two years ago. Some of the requests were direct messages, while others showed accounts tagging T-Pain in stories on their accounts. The senders included accounts belonging to Diplo, ESPN, Nickelodeon, Fergie, and Nate Robinson, as well as plenty of others.

"Ive been accidentally straight up ignoring all these people for like 2 years," another on-screen caption read as T-Pain, known for hits like 2007's "Buy U a Drank," continued to scroll.

Just 12 hours after he posted the video, it had been viewed over 2 million times on TikTok and went viral on other social-media platforms as well. On Twitter, some posted memes about the incident, while comments on TikTok empathized with the situation.

"T pain without the t," one comment on TikTok with over 55,000 likes read. Others urged the rapper to get back to certain accounts, particularly the one belonging to Oscar-nominated actress Viola Davis, "immediately."

"I swear! I'm just now seeing all these messages and mentions TODAY!!!!" T-Pain wrote in the description of his TikTok video. "How do I super apologize? Press conference? Town hall meeting? I'm dumb."