Thousands of iOS apps started crashing because of Google (wait, what?)

[phillynews215]

TL;DR

• A bug in Google Analytics for Firebase caused thousands of iOS apps to start crashing.
• Google resolved the bug in a couple of hours, but the crashes have continued for several hours due to caching.
• Some apps saw crash numbers over 5,000 times higher than normal.

App crashes aren’t new, but they usually happen with new software versions, new smartphones, or app updates. They are also usually fairly limited in scope. However, Google’s Firebase SDK reportedly experienced an issue a few hours ago that was catastrophic enough to crash thousands of iOS apps and send unsuspecting developers into a frenzy.

According to a now-resolved thread on the Google Firebase GitHub issue tracker, a problem in Google Analytics for Firebase iOS caused apps to crash at launch. Since thousands of apps rely on Firebase for backend development and analytics, they all started crashing around the same time, sparking a flurry of panicked posts from developers wondering what had happened.




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