Meta’s social media platforms Facebook and Instagram recovered after a brief service outage in the United States on Sunday, September 21, 2026, after thousands of users reported problems accessing the platforms.
According to outage-tracking website Downdetector, reports of disruptions increased sharply during the evening before falling significantly later at night, indicating that services had largely returned to normal.
The outage affected both Facebook and Instagram, although the actual number of users impacted may have differed from the number of reports recorded by Downdetector.
Outage Began Around 8:55 PM ET
The disruption began at around 8:55 PM Eastern Time, according to data cited by Reuters from Downdetector.
Reports related to Facebook peaked at more than 17,000, while Instagram recorded more than 5,000 reports during the outage.
Downdetector tracks service disruptions by collecting user-submitted reports and information from multiple sources. Its figures therefore indicate the volume of reported problems rather than providing an exact count of affected users.
The number of reports increased rapidly after the outage began, suggesting that a significant number of users experienced difficulties with Meta’s platforms during the period.
Facebook and Instagram Services Recover
By around 10:00 PM ET, outage reports for both Facebook and Instagram had fallen sharply.
The decline indicated that the services had largely recovered following the brief disruption.
Users who experienced problems earlier in the evening were subsequently able to regain access to the platforms as the number of reported issues decreased.
The outage appeared to be relatively short-lived, with service interruptions concentrated within a limited period on Sunday evening.
Meta Had Not Immediately Commented
Meta did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment regarding the cause of the outage.
As a result, the information available in the report did not establish what caused the disruption or whether it was linked to a particular technical issue.
The decline in user reports provided an indication that the platforms were recovering, but the company had not publicly explained the reason for the service interruption at the time of the report.
Downdetector Reports Do Not Equal Affected Users
Downdetector’s figures should not be interpreted as the exact number of people who experienced problems.
The website relies on user-submitted reports and combines information from multiple sources to identify potential service disruptions.
This means the actual number of affected Facebook and Instagram users could have been higher or lower than the reported figures.
Outage-tracking websites are commonly used to identify sudden increases in reports of technical problems, but they do not provide an official count of users affected by a service disruption.
Similar Outage Reported in July
Facebook and Instagram had also experienced a similar outage in July 2026.
During that incident, Downdetector recorded as many as 4,808 reports for Facebook and 2,829 reports for Instagram.
The September outage therefore generated a substantially higher number of reports at its peak, based on the figures cited by Reuters.
However, the report did not provide information establishing whether the two incidents had the same technical cause.
For users, the latest disruption was resolved relatively quickly, with reports falling sharply by around 10:00 PM ET.
The brief outage highlights how quickly disruptions to major social media platforms can affect large numbers of users when access to widely used online services is interrupted.
For now, Facebook and Instagram have largely recovered from the reported US outage, while the cause of the disruption remained unclear based on the information available in the Reuters report.
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