Did Facebook log you out on Tuesday? What happened to the Meta apps?

Facebook and Instagram went down Tuesday, with users reporting that they could not get Instagram to load and Facebook sessions were logging out.

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While Meta, the parent company for both social media platforms, was quiet as it assessed the problem, an internet intelligence team suggested that the Meta outage was probably caused by an issue with a backend service such as authentication, Forbes is reporting.

The issues with Facebook and Instagram started around 10:45 a.m. EST, with people reporting they couldn’t access the apps or had been signed out of them.

At the peak of the outage, there were more than 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram, according to outage tracking website Down Detector.

“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue ... for everyone who was impacted,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X Tuesday without elaborating on the issue.

The White House National Security Council was monitoring the incident and was not aware of any specific malicious cyber activity at this time, a spokesperson for the agency said, according to Reuters.

Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET, told Forbes that it’s “highly unlikely the outage was caused by a cyber-attack, but adds that this “can never be fully ruled out.”

Instead, it looks like the social media sites suffered an outage caused by an issue with a backend service, according to Cisco’s Thousand Eyes team which monitors the performance of services and networks across the Internet.

The outage comes ahead of a deadline on Wednesday for Meta and other tech companies, to comply with the Digital Markets Act, a new European Union law that aims to increase competition in the digital economy, The New York Times reported.

The law requires companies to overhaul how some of their products work so that smaller competitors can access their users.

Meta has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, according to Reuters.

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