Mark Zuckerberg and his co-founders launched Facebook in 2004 as TheFacebook at Harvard University.
The original service was limited to Harvard students and used university email addresses for registration. It expanded to other American universities before opening to high-school students and eventually the general public.
The name was shortened from TheFacebook to Facebook in 2005. A common mix-up is crediting Zuckerberg alone: Saverin, McCollum, Moskovitz, and Hughes were also part of the founding group, although their later roles and legal disputes differed.
Facebook later became the flagship service of Meta Platforms, the company formerly known as Facebook, Inc. Meta adopted that corporate name in 2021, while Facebook remained the name of the social network.