Meta's Facebook and Instagram experience major outage affecting thousands of users in the United States

On September 20, 2026, Facebook and Instagram, owned by Meta, experienced a major outage affecting thousands of users in the U.S. The disruption began around 8:55 PM ET, with over 17,000 reports for Facebook and more than 5,000 for Instagram. Users reported difficulties accessing the platforms' websites. By 10 PM ET, the number of outage reports had significantly decreased, indicating that services were recovering.