Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg together with fellow Harvard University students.
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Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg while he was a student at Harvard University, alongside co-founders Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.
The site launched under the name “TheFacebook,” hosted at thefacebook.com, and was initially restricted to Harvard students only, using their university email addresses to verify identity. The idea drew loosely on the printed “face books” some American universities handed out to help students identify each other, adapted into a digital, interactive version. Zuckerberg built and launched the first version from his Harvard dorm room in a matter of days.
| Period | Who could join |
|---|---|
| February 2004 | Harvard University students only |
| Spring 2004 | Expanded to other Ivy League and select universities |
| 2005 | Opened to high school students and more universities worldwide |
| 2006 | Opened to anyone aged 13 or older with a valid email address |
The founding of Facebook was not without controversy. Twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, along with Divya Narendra, claimed Zuckerberg had taken their idea for a similar social networking site called HarvardConnection while working on their project as a contractor. The dispute was eventually settled out of court, a story later dramatized, with some fictionalized elements, in the 2010 film The Social Network.
Knowing the actual founding date helps separate fact from the many myths that circulate about Facebook’s origins, especially since the popular film added dramatic details that were not entirely accurate. February 4, 2004 remains the date Meta itself recognizes as Facebook’s official founding, and it is still referenced in the company’s own historical materials and investor communications today.
Facebook launched a few years after early social networking pioneers such as Friendster and MySpace, both of which were already popular when TheFacebook debuted in 2004. What set Facebook apart in its first years was the requirement for a verified university email address, which created a smaller, more trusted network before the platform gradually opened up to the general public between 2005 and 2006, a staged rollout its earlier competitors did not follow.
Meta’s newsroom and annual investor filings both cite February 4, 2004 as the company’s founding date, and this is the date typically used in press materials, corporate history pages and academic references to the platform’s origins. Some sources instead reference the date the company was legally incorporated as Facebook, Inc., which came slightly later that same year, so small discrepancies of a few months between different articles usually come down to which milestone is being described.
