Firebase Bug Wipes Out Thousands of iOS Apps
A bug in Google's Firebase SDK caused thousands of iOS apps to crash on Tuesday. The issue affected apps that relied on Firebase for backend development and analytics, leading to a flurry of panicked posts from developers.
The problem was reportedly related to Google Analytics for Firebase iOS, causing apps to crash at launch. According to the Firebase Status Dashboard, no incidents were logged, but the company may still be working to fully resolve the issue and identify the root cause.
Developers reported that some apps saw crash numbers over 5,000 times higher than normal, with one developer saying they burned through a large number of tokens while trying to debug their app. The crashes continued for several hours due to caching, but Google rolled out a fix a couple of hours after the issue was identified.
The company said that due to caching, some apps could crash for up to four hours after the fix was deployed. However, as of an hour ago, developers reported that crashes had dropped significantly, though they were still much higher than normal.