A number of popular apps and services including, PUBG, Spotify, Pinterest, and Tinder were inaccessible today on iOS devices due to a now-resolved issue involving Facebook log-ins, theverge reports.
There were widespread reports on social media of apps crashing whenever launched on iPhones and iPads, and corresponding outage spikes on DownDetector.com.
The cause of the outages seems to have been Facebook’s software development kit, or SDK, which many apps use to manage user logins. Users don’t have to be using Facebook to log into an app for this to affect their software (they don’t even have to have it installed), and there were no reports of the same apps crashing on Android.
There's another facebook SDK issue that lead's to our iOS app to crash on launch again along with major apps like Spotify & Pinterest 🔥 @fb_engineering
— Peter Juras (@peterjuras) July 10, 2020
Facebook acknowledged on its developer platform this morning that its software was causing problems. “We are aware and investigating an increase in errors on the iOS SDK which is causing some apps to crash,” said the firm. In a GitHub thread posted around 7AM ET, numerous developers reported problems with their apps and blamed Facebook, too.
By around 9.30AM ET, though, most users were reporting that the apps were working again, and by 10.30AM ET Facebook had marked the issue as “resolved.”
