Meta’s Facebook and Instagram have recovered after a brief outage disrupted access for thousands of users across several countries.
The disruption began on Sunday, September 20, with reports on outage-tracking platform Downdetector. In the United States, Facebook recorded more than 17,000 reports, while Instagram passed 5,000.
The services began recovering within about an hour, and by 10 p.m. ET (3 a.m. WAT), reports had dropped, indicating that access had largely returned.
Users outside the US also reported problems, with complaints coming from Singapore, the Philippines, Australia, Mexico and parts of Europe. In Singapore, Facebook reports reached 229 while Instagram recorded 109 reports during the morning of September 21.
Many of those reports involved the websites rather than the mobile apps. Some users said Facebook displayed only its logo or a blank screen instead of loading the main page.
Instagram users also reported problems loading content and accessing the service. Threads and Messenger recorded disruptions as well, although the scale varied by location.
The outage was larger than a similar incident in July. Downdetector recorded 4,808 reports for Facebook and 2,829 for Instagram during that earlier disruption.
The incident also reached more markets than the July outage. Reports from Asia and Latin America, alongside those from the US and Europe, showed that users in different regions experienced problems around the same period.
However, Downdetector’s figures do not represent the total number of people affected. The platform collects reports from users and compares them with normal activity levels, so the actual number of affected users could be different.
Meta had not publicly explained the cause of the disruption at the time of reporting. The company also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The incident is the latest in a series of service disruptions affecting Meta’s platforms this year, including an outage in June and another disruption in July.
