Mark Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook at Harvard University in 2004.
The service launched on February 4, 2004, originally for Harvard students. It expanded to other American universities, then to high schools and eventually to users around the world. Zuckerberg co-founded it with Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.
Facebook became the central platform of a much larger technology company. Facebook Inc. acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. In 2021, the company changed its corporate name to Meta Platforms to emphasize its broader focus on social technology and the metaverse. Facebook remains the name of the social network, not the current corporate name of its parent company.