Facebook and Instagram experienced an outage in the U.S.

In the U.S., Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram experienced a brief outage. The incident began on Sunday evening, Reuters reports, citing the monitoring service Downdetector.

The outage began around 8:55 p.m. on September 20 Eastern Time (or 5:00 a.m. on September 21 Astana time): at its peak, the number of reports of problems accessing Facebook exceeded 17,000, and those regarding Instagram exceeded 5,000. About an hour later, the number of reports of outages on Downdetector dropped sharply, indicating that service was restored, Reuters notes.

Meta did not promptly respond to the agency's inquiry about the incident.

A similar outage affecting Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta services was reported in July—at that time, Downdetector received up to 4,808 reports of issues accessing Facebook and 2,829 regarding Instagram, Reuters notes.

In premarket trading, Meta shares are nevertheless up more than 2 percent—Reuters notes that tech stocks are rising in Asia amid falling oil prices. A similar trend is also being seen in European stocks, Investing notes.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor