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Facebook, Instagram suffer major outage in US
The disruption affected access for thousands of users

Facebook, Instagram suffer major outage in US

Sep 21, 2026
08:45 am

What's the story

Meta's social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, suffered a major outage in the United States on Sunday evening. The disruption affected access for thousands of users and led to a spike in complaints on Downdetector, an outage-tracking website. According to Downdetector, Facebook had over 17,000 reports of issues by 9:11pm ET while Instagram had over 5,000 reports around the same time.

Outage details

Downdetector numbers don't reflect total users affected

The figures from Downdetector indicate a major disruption on Facebook and Instagram, but they don't reveal how many people were actually unable to use the services.

The website collects reports from users and other sources to identify potential service interruptions.

Therefore, its numbers can go up or down independently of the total number of customers affected.

Outage impact

Many took to X to check if others were affected

The nature and cause of the disruption on Facebook and Instagram were not immediately clear from the available information.

There was also no immediate indication of how widely the problem extended beyond the US.

As thousands of users reported issues with Meta's services, many took to X to see if others were facing similar problems.

Posts about the service disruption began appearing on X after reports started coming in.

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Official response

Meta yet to comment on cause of disruption

Despite the widespread reports of outages on Facebook and Instagram, Meta's official service status page has not reported any disruptions or technical issues.

At the time of writing, Meta had not publicly commented on the cause of this disruption. It was unclear if it was due to a server issue, infrastructure problem, or some other technical glitch on their end.

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