Facebook code change caused outage for Spotify, Pinterest and Waze apps

If you’re an iPhone user, odds are fairly good you spent a frustrating portion of the morning attempting to reopen apps. I know my morning walk was dampened by the inability to fire up Spotify. Plenty of other users reported similar issues with a number of apps, including Pinterest and Waze.

The issue has since been resolved, with Facebook noting that the problem rests firmly on its shoulders. A log page notes a sudden spike in errors stemming from Facebook’s iOS SDK, dating back several hours. Facebook says the issue is the fault of a change in code.

“Earlier today, a code change triggered crashes for some iOS apps using the Facebook SDK,” the developer team writes. “We identified the issue quickly and resolved it. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

While the issue was addressed relatively swiftly (though a few hours can feel like a lifetime, depending on how reliant you are on a given app), annoyed parties will no doubt remember back in May when an SDK update created a similar wave of issues. The issue was no doubt even more distressing to developers whose apps utilize the SDK.

After the second major issue in recent memory, it’s easy to imagine many reconsidering their relationship with the social network — after all, a bad experience can put people off an app entirely, as social media debates around Apple Music versus Spotify appeared to point to this morning. Many users will ultimately place the blame at the feet of a given app, rather than a third-party SDK that caused the crash.

When it comes to updating the SDK, Facebook is seemingly moving too fast and breaking too many things. We’ve reached out to the company to see how it plans to address the issue going forward.

Source: TechCrunch