iOS Apps Suddenly Crashing Blamed On Facebook SDK Server Change
Given today's circumstances, people are even more dependent on their computers and smartphones, particularly the apps that let them work at home or communicate with friends and family or even just keep themselves from going insane. The stability of these apps has become even more important these days, which is why some developers have opted to pause rolling out huge changes that could risk breaking things. Unfortunately, it may take just a single change not in the app but on a remote server that could bring several apps down, like this very odd case related to Facebook's SDK.
To be clear, it isn't officially confirmed what has suddenly caused dozens of apps, including high-profile ones like Spotify, Waze, Pinterest, and TikTok from suddenly crashing the moment you start them up. The reports of such outages have been so wide, so numerous, and so sudden that users wouldn't have been able to trace a common factor. It turns out, one common factor with these apps is that they use Facebook's SDK to provide the option to log into the app using the social media account.
Unfortunately for users, Facebook didn't need to roll out an update to the SDK on users' phones to cause chaos. A simple server-side change was apparently enough to cause apps using the SDK to crash. That change has been reverted, according to the report, but it might take some time for it to propagate to all users across the world.
The more worrying aspect of this incident is that users who didn't even use Facebook logins were affected by this issue. The app just needed to be linked to the Facebook SDK in one way or another for it come crashing down like a house of cards.
More than just carelessness on Facebook's part, this does reveal a small but critical problem in how iOS supports these SDK. If it takes a single remote change to take down numerous apps, then there is potentially something broken with the architecture. Considering the already strained relationship between the two tech companies, Apple will probably not be so happy about this new Facebook blunder.