Many popular apps didn't work for a couple of hours because of the Facebook SDK

A bad day for iOS developers. Many mobile applications on this platform did not work today. It’s all the fault of a bug in the Facebook SDK. It led to constant “crashes” of those programs in which the SDK was installed.

The problem affected a lot of people, including top—end applications. According to the media and users, Spotify, Tinder, Viber, Mario Kart, TikTok and Pinterest were temporarily inoperable. Yandex also reported failures in operation.

On GitHub, developers noted that there were problems when installing a variety of versions of the Facebook SDK. The error was encountered on 5.0.2, 5.1.1, 5.2.3, 5.5.0, and even 7.1.1. However, some managed to fix the situation on their own by finding a suitable working version.

At 17.30 Moscow time, Facebook announced that the problem was “solved”. Representatives of the social network said that the reason for the error was a change in the code. It led to the “downfall of some iOS apps using the Facebook SDK.” Some of the teams on GitHub confirmed the appearance of the “fix”.

Developers using the Facebook SDK are not the first time faced with a similar problem. A similar case occurred two months ago. Then, due to an identical problem in the Facebook SDK, some popular applications were also temporarily unavailable.

Facebook does not provide a universal solution to how to avoid such a situation in the future. At the same time, the instability of the Facebook SDK threatens app publishers with significant financial losses. If such an error occurs during an advertising campaign, the publisher loses the newly acquired users, and with them the money spent on promotion.

It is unclear whether the social network is ready to compensate developers for these losses. Representatives of marketing companies with whom we talked about the possibility of such a scenario have not heard about compensation from Facebook.

Against this background, it is not surprising that after such incidents, some developers begin to look for alternatives. Facebook SDK. Some even say directly: it’s time to use Apple solutions for user authentication — here ASWebAuthenticationSession.

The rest of the developers, in case of a repeat of the situation, can only stop the purchase as soon as possible and wait for corrections. This was announced to us and Nikita Grigorovich, Chief Operating Officer of Borscht, and Evgeny Marchenkov, CEO of AdSide Media.