Facebook led to crashing of several popular apps on iOS
What's the story
A few hours ago, Spotify, Tinder, TikTok, Pinterest, and many other popular apps started crashing on iOS. The issue drew widespread attention from the public, triggering a wave of complaints on social media. But, as it turns out, it was not a problem of these apps; the real culprit was social media giant Facebook. Here's what went down.
Issue
Sudden crashes of apps
When the issue began, the aforementioned apps and many more started crashing repeatedly. They became unresponsive soon after launch, leaving the user with no option but to try re-opening them. The problem was reported by a number of iOS users on Twitter, Reddit, and DownDetector, clearly indicating that the problem was widespread and not isolated to a handful of devices.
Culprit
Developers revealed it was a bug in Facebook's SDK
As the issue surfaced, the developers of some of the affected apps took to a GitHub thread, informing the public that the issue was tied to an SDK tool that powers the Facebook login button (for quick sign-in) on their respective platforms. They claimed that the social media recently released a buggy server-side update for the SDK, causing an error that crashed their apps.
Fix
Later, Facebook fixed the bug, making the apps operational
In typical Facebook fashion, the social network took note of the matter and quickly issued a fix for the SDK. "A new release of Facebook included a change that triggered crashes for some users in some apps using the Facebook iOS SDK," a Facebook spokesperson told The Verge. "We identified the issue quickly and resolved it. We apologize for any inconvenience."
Functioning
Now, all apps appear to be functioning normally
That said, all the affected iOS apps now appear to be working normally, even Spotify, which, reports indicate, was out for nearly two hours. Also, the bug was only associated with the iOS SDK of Facebook, so if you are on Android, there is no need to worry that your favorite apps would crash due to some weird internal issue.