Facebook Software Development Kit Causing Spotify, Twitter, and More to Crash Friday Morning

Several popular apps appear to be crashing on Friday morning — and it seems Facebook is to blame.

A swathe of popular services, including Spotify, Pinterest, Twitter, Viber, Venmo, Tinder, and even Apple’s App Store, are experiencing technical difficulties, reads a new report from The Verge. The exact number of affected users is unclear at present, but over 15,000 people have collectively reported unable to access Spotify, Pinterest, and Waze, according to Down Detector.

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 SDKs enable you to pass app-event data from your app to Facebook. With app event data, you can accurately track and measure the actions people take in your app,” Facebook’s developer website says.

If the Facebook code is indeed the issue, it will be the second time it has caused issues for iOS users in recent months, with a number of apps also brought down in May.

“We are aware and investigating an increase in errors on the iOS SDK which is causing some apps to crash,” a message on Facebook’s status dashboard reads.

Until Facebook fixes the problem, one fix is to install Lockdown, which blocks trackers, ads, and hardware on all your apps, this will stop your apps from crashing.