A little after 6 pm ET on Wednesday, the system started blinking red for iOS developer Clay Jones. Like many devs, Jones uses a Google product called Crashlytics to keep tabs on when his app stops working. Out of nowhere, it registered tens of thousands of crashes. It also pointed to the cause: a chunk of code that Jones’ app incorporates to let people log in with their Facebook accounts.
By 6:30 pm, Jones had filed a bug report about the flaw in Facebook’s software development kit on GitHub, the code repository. He provided succinct answers to a standardized form:
What do you want to achieve? We are using FBSDK in our app as an authentication option.
What do you expect to happen? I would like FBSDK to not crash.
He wasn’t alone. According to widespread reports and the web monitoring service Down Detector, prominent iOS apps like TikTok, Spotify, Pinterest, Venmo, and more experienced issues on Wednesday. Many users found that they crashed whenever they tried to open the apps, whether or not they used Facebook to log in. “Please move slower and break fewer things,” wrote one GitHub commenter. “Thank you.”
“Yesterday, a new release of Facebook included a change that triggered crashes in some apps using the Facebook iOS SDK for some users. We identified the issue quickly and resolved it,” Facebook said in a statement.
That change was quite small, given its outsized impact. “It was something like a server value—which was supposed to provide a dictionary of things—was changed to providing a simple YES/NO instead, without warning,” says iOS developer Steven Troughton-Smith. “A change that simple can break an app that isn't prepared for it.”
The use of SDKs, not just from Faceboo ..
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