Facebook, Instagram hit by brief outage

Meta’s social media platforms Facebook and Instagram returned to normal after a brief outage in the United States on Sunday (September 20)night, with thousands of users reporting problems on both services.

The disruption began at around 8:55PM local time, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks outages across online services. More than 17,000 reports of problems with Facebook and over 5,000 reports involving Instagram were recorded.

According to a Reuters report, the number of outage reports dropped sharply around 10PM, suggesting that services had largely been restored by then.

Meta did not immediately comment on the cause of the disruption and did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

Downdetector’s figures are based on user-submitted reports and therefore do not necessarily indicate the actual number of people affected by an outage.

Facebook and Instagram experienced a similar disruption in July. At the time, Downdetector recorded a peak of 4,808 reports for Facebook and 2,829 for Instagram.