A number of popular apps and services including Spotify, Pinterest, and Tinder are currently broken on iOS devices, with early analysis suggesting Facebook is to blame.
There are widespread reports on social media of apps crashing whenever they’re launched on iPhones and iPads, and corresponding outage spikes on DownDetector.com. The apps can be launched if the device is offline, which is useful in some cases (if you have lots of music saved on Spotify, for example) but will completely break their functionality in others.
Although the exact cause of the outages isn’t yet confirmed, early reports suggest the problem is caused by Facebook’s software development kit, or SDK, which many apps use to manage user logins. Users don’t have to be using Facebook to log into an app for this to affect their software, and there are no reports of the same apps crashing on Android.
Facebook acknowledged on its developer platform this morning that its software was causing problems. “We are aware and investigating an increase in errors on the iOS SDK which is causing some apps to crash,” said the firm. In a GitHub thread posted around 7AM ET, numerous developers reported problems with their apps and blamed Facebook, too.
