Facebook and Instagram went down for US users on Sunday night
Facebook and Instagram stopped working for users across the United States on Sunday evening, with the outage tracker Downdetector logging more than 17,000 reports for Facebook and over 5,000 for Instagram by 9.11pm ET. Those are report counts, not user counts, and the distinction does real work here. Downdetector tallies problems that people voluntarily submit […] This story continues at The Next Web
Facebook and Instagram stopped working for users across the United States on Sunday evening, with the outage tracker Downdetector logging more than 17,000 reports for Facebook and over 5,000 for Instagram by 9.11pm ET.
Those are report counts, not user counts, and the distinction does real work here. Downdetector tallies problems that people voluntarily submit to it.
Set against a service with roughly two billion daily users, 17,000 submissions establish that something broke somewhere.
They do not measure how widely it broke, and several aggregators have already rewritten the figure as 17,000 affected users, which it is not.
Tom’s Guide, tracking the outage live , put its start time at around 9.25pm ET, which is after the 17,000 figure was recorded. On that reading, the number is an early snapshot rather than a peak, and the true peak has not been reported by anyone.
Meta has not commented; its status page showed no disruption throughout, and the company did not respond to inquiries from outlets covering the outage.
Both services were working again by the US morning. No restoration timestamp exists for any account, leaving the duration somewhere between one and several hours.
Despite wireframing that referred broadly to Meta’s social networks, there is no evidence WhatsApp or Threads were affected. Every source that named specific services named only Facebook and Instagram.
The useful comparison is the outage in June , which drew between 110,000 and 130,000 reports, lasted about four hours, took down Messenger and Business Suite, and prompted an acknowledgment from Meta communications director Andy Stone.
Sunday’s event was roughly a seventh that size and produced no acknowledgment at all.
It is the third notable Meta outage of 2026, after June and a shorter incident in July that also went unexplained.
None of the three has been publicly attributed to a cause, which is the more interesting pattern and not one a single evening’s report can settle.
For now, the record consists of a chart that rose on Sunday night and fell again before morning.
