FaceTime Is Down, Bug Fix Hopefully Coming Soon

Software bugs, just like their physical counterparts, are a fact of life. They can be avoided, yes, but not completely. There are some bugs, however, that are so terrible they might make you squirm uncomfortably. The recently discovered FaceTime bug could be one of those considering its dire consequences for user privacy. Now the service is seemingly down for the count, hopefully, because Apple is scrambling to fix it.

The FaceTime bug, in a nutshell, lets anyone spy on you just by ringing your iPhone through FaceTime. You don't even need to answer the call. The caller will be able to hear the recipient with no one being the wiser.

It gets worse. If you do accept the call, for whatever reason, the caller could simply hang up and then they'll have live access to a spy cam courtesy of the FaceTime camera. Kinda the opposite of what you'd expect when you end a call.

Apple has acknowledged the existence of the bug but some find that its response is just as bad. It promised a fix that will be rolling out later this week. For a bug that turns every iPhone into a potential eavesdropping device, Apple should perhaps mark it as a critical bug that needs to be fixed ASAP.

That may be the case now that its System Status page reports FaceTime to be down with issues. It could simply be Apple's stopgap measure to stop anyone from using FaceTime while it works on a fix to be rolled out "later this week". Until then, FaceTime users might want to tape something over their front-facing cameras or at least disable FaceTime until everything is clear.