A mistake at Facebook broke Spotify, Venmo, TikTok, and other iPhone apps

Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg speaks at Facebook's F8 summit in 2018. (credit: JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images)

Users of numerous popular iPhone apps such as Spotify, Venmo, Tinder, TikTok, DoorDash, and Pinterest experienced persistent app crashes as a result of a bug in Facebook's SDK this week. The crash reports began coming in around 6:30pm Eastern yesterday, but the issue has since been resolved.

Not long after the problem emerged, it was revealed to have been caused by a server-side change by Facebook. "A new release of Facebook included a change that triggered crashes for some users in some apps using the Facebook iOS SDK. We identified the issue quickly and resolved it. We apologize for any inconvenience," a Facebook spokesperson told The Verge.

The Facebook SDK is included in apps by developers for a number of reasons, from offering single sign-on using users' Facebook accounts to enabling sophisticated metrics for Facebook ads. The apps were attempting to communicate with Facebook's servers and crashing as a result. The crashes happened even if users were not logged in to Facebook, did not have any apps made by Facebook installed, or were not using any Facebook-related features in the affected apps.

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