A critical bug discovered on Facebook affected the operation of several apps for devices for more than three hours on Wednesday, according to reports shared on GitHub and on social media. Specifically, the bug affected some of the largest and most popular iOS apps available today. Among the apps affected are TikTok, Spotify, Tinder, Venmo, GrubHub, Doordash, Soundcloud and Pinterest. These are just a few of the apps that were impacted by the bug discovered on Facebook.
According to a technical analysis of error logs posted online, the flaw was found in Facebook's software development kit (SDK) for iOS devices, a library that developers include in their apps to support features such as sharing, the social graph and Facebook connections. The developers said that the Facebook SDK for iOS devices informed Facebook's servers every time a user started using an app that included the library.
The issue was that the SDK was expecting a response from a server in a specific format, which Facebook’s servers were not providing on Wednesday. Since it did not receive the appropriate response, the Facebook SDK crashed, affecting the operation of all applications that used it. Although Facebook has not yet made any official announcement regarding this incident, the company appears to have released a patch for the servers, about three hours after reports of the malfunctioning applications began to be shared online. However, due to the criticality and impact of the error, several hashtags, such as #tiktokdown and #spotifydown, were noted on Twitter on Wednesday evening, while many reports were also observed on GitHub as well as HackerNews.
