You’ve heard the legend. A 19-year-old kid in a messy Harvard dorm room hacks together a website in a week, and suddenly, the world is connected. It sounds like a movie script—literally, it became one. But if you think the launch date of facebook was just a clean, one-day event where a switch was flipped and a billion users showed up, you're missing the best parts of the story.
Honestly, the "birth" of Facebook was more of a chaotic, legal-mess-waiting-to-happen than a polished corporate debut.
The Real Calendar: February 4, 2004
Mark Zuckerberg didn't just wake up and decide to change the world. He was actually fresh off a disciplinary hearing for a previous project called Facemash. That site was basically a "Hot or Not" for Harvard students, and it nearly got him expelled in late 2003. But the rush of traffic—450 people and 22,000 photo votes in just four hours—showed him that people were obsessed with looking at each other online.
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So, in January 2004, he started writing code for something new. He called it "TheFacebook."
The official launch date of facebook happened on February 4, 2004. It wasn't at facebook.com yet; it lived at thefacebook.com. Zuckerberg, along with his roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, watched the first wave of registrations trickle in.
By the next morning? Over 1,200 students had signed up. Within a month, half of the Harvard undergraduate population had a profile.
It Wasn't Just One Launch
People always ask about "the" launch date, but Facebook actually had several "birthdays" depending on who you were.
- Harvard Only: Feb 4, 2004.
- The Ivy League Expansion: By March 2004, it spread to Yale, Columbia, and Stanford.
- The Global Public: This is the big one. On September 26, 2006, Facebook finally opened its doors to anyone over 13 with a valid email address.
Before 2006, you had to be a student or have a corporate email (like at Apple or Microsoft) to get in. It was an exclusive club. When it went public, the "OG" college users actually hated it. They felt like the neighborhood was getting ruined by "moms and randoms." Sorta funny looking back, right?
The Drama You Didn't See
Six days. That’s all it took for the first major lawsuit to arrive.
On February 10, 2004, three Harvard seniors—Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra—accused Zuckerberg of stealing their idea. They claimed he’d agreed to help them build a social network called HarvardConnection (later ConnectU) but instead stalled their project while using their concepts to build his own.
This wasn't just campus gossip. It turned into a legal war that lasted years and ended in a massive settlement.
What the Site Actually Looked Like
If you logged into Facebook on its 2004 launch date, you wouldn't recognize it.
There was no "Like" button. That didn't arrive until 2009. There was no News Feed (launched in 2006). You couldn't even upload multiple photos easily. It was basically a digital version of the paper "face books" universities handed out—a list of profiles where you could see who was in your classes or find out if that cute person in your psych lecture was single.
The original logo even had a guy’s face on it. It was a pixelated image of Al Pacino, covered in binary code, hidden in the header. Andrew McCollum, one of the co-founders, designed it. It was weird.
Key Milestones in the Early Years
The transition from a dorm project to a global power happened fast.
- April 2004: The company officially becomes an LLC.
- June 2004: Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal) drops the first big check—$500,000 in angel funding.
- August 2005: They officially drop the "The" and buy the domain facebook.com for $200,000.
- December 2005: Tagging is introduced. This changed everything. Suddenly, you weren't just looking at profiles; you were being alerted when your friends posted photos of you.
Why the Launch Date Still Matters
The reason we still talk about February 4 is that it marked a shift in how the internet worked. Before Facebook, social media like MySpace was about customization—glittery backgrounds and auto-playing music. Facebook was about identity. It required your real name. It was clean. It was built on the "social graph"—the idea that who you know is the most important data point in your life.
Today, Meta (the parent company) has billions of users across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. But it all traces back to that one Tuesday in February when a few sophomores decided to put the Harvard student directory online.
What to Do Next
If you're looking to dig deeper into the history or protect your own data on the platform today, here are some actionable steps:
- Check your "Join Date": You can actually see when you joined by going to "Settings & Privacy" > "Your Information" > "Access Your Information." It’s a fun trip down memory lane.
- Audit your Legacy: If you've been on the site since the early days, you likely have old posts that don't reflect who you are now. Use the "Activity Log" to bulk-delete old content from your "college years."
- Secure your Account: Since Facebook is now a hub for so many other services, ensure you have Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) turned on. Go to "Security and Login" to set this up.
- Read the Source: If you want the unvarnished version of the launch drama, look up the original Harvard Crimson articles from February 2004. They offer a "live" look at the tension on campus as the site blew up.
The launch of Facebook wasn't just a tech event; it was the start of the modern social era. Whether that's a good or bad thing depends on who you ask, but there's no denying that everything changed on February 4, 2004.