Facebook Went Down Sunday Night For Users Across United States
Facebook and Instagram went down for users across the United States and internationally on Sunday night September 20, beginning shortly before 9 PM Eastern and generating more than 17,000 outage reports on Downdetector for Facebook alone and over 5,000 for Instagram within the first hour.
Users reported being forcibly logged out with error messages including "Session Expired," "Invalid Password" and "Unknown Error" when attempting to log back in. The desktop version was hit hardest, though mobile app users also reported issues.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed the company was aware of the issue and that technical teams were working on a fix.
No cause was publicly disclosed. Service appeared to be largely restored within approximately an hour, though some users reported intermittent issues into Sunday night.
It is the third notable Meta outage of 2026, following incidents in June and a shorter disruption in July, neither of which Meta publicly explained.
The Outlook outage on August 31 and now this one mark two consecutive months in which major social or communication platforms have had unexpected downtime affecting large user populations. Meta has not addressed the pattern.
