Popular apps and services, including Spotify, Pinterest , and Tinder, have been devices iOS. Early analysis suggests that Facebook is responsible for the performance issues.
There have been numerous reports on social media of apps crashing on iPhones and iPads, and outages have also been observed via DownDetector.com. Apps can work when the device is offline, which is useful in some cases (if you have a lot of music stored on Spotify, for example), but it doesn't serve other apps that need to be connected to the internet to function.
While the exact cause of the outages has yet to be confirmed, early reports suggest the issue is due to Facebook's software development kit, or SDK , which many apps use to manage user logins . iPhone and iPad users are affected even if they don't use Facebook to log into one of the apps. On the other hand, there are no reports that Spotify, Pinterest, or Tinder are having issues on Android.
Facebook notified developers this morning about the software issue. “We are aware of and investigating an increase in bugs in the iOS SDK that are causing many apps to crash,” the company. In a GitHub thread, multiple developers reported issues with their apps and also blamed Facebook.
The annoyance of developers and users is justified, given that this is not the first time that Facebook's SDK has caused problems in applications. A similar problem appeared on May 6 and affected dozens of services.
App developer Guilherme Rambo had said that the root of the problem is that Facebook encourages developers to integrate log-in services into their apps.
“Facebook is pushing developers to install its SDK, probably because it’s thinking about the data it can collect from users of these apps,” Rambo said in May. “The SDK is offered as a convenience for both developers and marketing teams.”.
This means, however, that when there's a problem with Facebook's services, a huge number of apps are affected, as happened today. Every time a user opens an app that uses the SDK, it makes a call to servers to prepare for login authentication. (That's why opening an app offline prevents the problem, although you can install an app that blocks these calls.)
