Should you change your Facebook, Instagram password after outages?
If you were told you had an "invalid password" on Facebook or Instagram Tuesday, the issue actually had nothing to do with your password.
(NEXSTAR) – For about 90 minutes Tuesday morning, Facebook and Instagram users found themselves locked out of the social media platforms. When trying to log back in, users were repeatedly told they entered an "invalid password."
But the problem turned out to have nothing to do with people's passwords. It was a widespread outage caused by a "technical issue," Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) said.
The outage was not caused by a hack nor a breach, a company spokesperson told Nexstar, so there's no reason to rush and change your password now.
Even though passwords weren't compromised during the issues, Meta reminds users the best way to keep their accounts safe is to enable two-factor authentication. That sets up another layer of security when people try and access your accounts.
You can turn on or adjust two-factor authentication in your account settings.
The outage comes just ahead of Thursday's deadline for Big Tech companies to comply with the European Union’s new Digital Markets Act. To comply, Meta is making changes, like allowing users to separate their Facebook and Instagram accounts so personal information can’t be combined to target them with online ads. It’s not clear whether the outage is connected to any preparations Meta might be carrying out for the DMA.
In 2021, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for hours, an outage the company said was a result of faulty changes on routers that coordinate network traffic between its data centers. The next year, WhatsApp had another brief outage.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.