Spotify, Venmo, and other iOS apps went down because of a Facebook SDK

By Christian de Looper May 6, 2020

The new Facebook software development kit wreaked havoc on a number of iOS apps for over an hour on Wednesday — causing them to crash for hundreds of thousands of users.

According to users on Twitter and GitHub, the new software development kit, or SDK, caused a range of apps to crash — including major apps like Venmo, Waze, Spotify, and more. The SDK essentially allows those apps to connect to Facebook and use some of its features, like allowing users to log in using their Facebook account. Thankfully, the issue seems to have now been fixed.

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DownDetector reported huge upticks in crashes on many major apps, including Spotify, TikTok, Tinder, Viber, and more. Based on tweets, it seems as though the Spotify app had been down for almost two hours starting at 3 p.m. PT.

The issue itself simply caused apps to crash right after opening — essentially rendering them useless. While there were unofficial workarounds, like blocking the “facebook.com” domain in a router’s DNS settings, those fixes were complicated and wouldn’t work when not connected to Wi-Fi.

The Facebook SDK essentially allows users to be able to sign on to an app through Facebook — but even people who don’t use Facebook to sign in to apps and services may still have been affected. That’s because the apps still have that feature as an option, and as such still include the Facebook SDK code.

Facebook has yet to respond with a comment, but we’ve reached out to the company, along with the developers of many of the major affected apps, and will update this story when we hear more.

List of apps that were affected by the Facebook SDK

A number of major apps seem to have been affected by the issue, including some of the most popular apps out there. Here’s a list of some of the apps that we could confirm weren’t working, though it’s likely that many more were affected too.

Spotify
Venmo
TikTok
Pinterest
Waze
Calm
Postmates
Viber

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Christian de Looper

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Christian’s interest in technology began as a child in Australia, when he stumbled upon a computer at a garage sale that he…

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