Letterboxd Goes Down, Locking Out 30 Million Users Mid-Sale Talks
Letterboxd, the film-rating social platform with more than 30 million users worldwide, went dark on Sunday morning — and anyone trying to log back in found the door shut.
The outage began around 6 a.m. PT on 9 August 2026, with over 1,000 users reporting problems on DownDetector, according to Variety. People opening the app were signed out of their profiles without warning. Attempts to sign back in simply bounced them to the login page. On the website, the error message was blunter: "An error occurred. Please try again later."
Letterboxd acknowledged the problem on Instagram, posting that its team was aware of the outage and working to restore access as soon as possible. No cause has been given. The Auckland-based company, founded in 2011, has not yet said when full service will return.
For the uninitiated: Letterboxd is where film lovers rate, review, and catalogue the movies they watch — think of it as a social network built around your watchlist. It passed 30 million users as of June 2026, having added 10 million of those in 2025 alone, Variety reports. That growth has turned a once-niche corner of cinephile culture into a platform with real scale — and real suitors.
A Puck report in early July 2026 placed Letterboxd in early acquisition talks with several high-profile buyers, including Netflix, Sony Pictures, Paramount Skydance, the private equity firm TPG, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Netflix, Paramount, and Sony Pictures all declined to comment on the reported talks. TPG did not respond to requests for comment. A Letterboxd representative said any decision about the company's future would involve the founders.
This is not the platform's first significant outage. Letterboxd experienced an hours-long disruption in July 2024, when the service was down for more than six hours before the company confirmed it was back online around 9:30 p.m. ET, Variety reported at the time.
For now, the 30 million people who use Letterboxd to argue about films, track their viewing, and rank their yearly favourites are simply waiting — locked out, with no timeline for a fix.
