On Sunday around 9 p.m. Eastern Time on September 20, various services under the tech giant Meta, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger, experienced a brief outage. Users worldwide reported issues with the web version and apps not loading or logging in properly. While services have gradually returned to normal, Meta has not yet provided specific details on the cause of the outage.
According to reports from the internet performance and testing company Downdetector, around 9:11 p.m. Eastern Time, there was a peak in reports, with over 17,000 outage reports for Facebook in the U.S. and over 5,000 reports for Instagram. Taiwan, Canada, Australia, and the U.K. also had numerous reports of disruptions.
These figures are mainly based on user-submitted status reports, so the actual number of affected individuals may be higher. The issues notably started to ease around 10 p.m.
Numerous media outlets have reached out to Meta for information regarding the cause and extent of the outage, but no official response has been provided.
Meta’s platforms have experienced intermittent outages of varying scales multiple times this year. The September 20 outage was classified as a moderate-scale incident with a relatively quick recovery.
On July 27, Facebook and Instagram experienced disruptions, with approximately 4,800 and 2,800 outage reports respectively, along with impacts on Threads.
On July 19, Facebook in the U.S. received over 23,000 reports in a single day, and Instagram had over 18,000 reports. The disruption lasted about 1 to 2 hours and affected multiple countries.
In June, Meta faced a larger-scale global outage, with Facebook reporting a peak of over 60,000 incidents.
Meta’s most severe outage occurred in October 2021 when Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp simultaneously went down for approximately 6 hours, impacting countless users.