A Facebook bug caused popular apps like Spotify and Tinder to crash for iPhone users

• A Facebook bug caused popular iPhone apps including Spotify, Tinder, Pinterest, and PUBG Mobile to crash on Friday for many users.
• The outage was traced to an issue with Facebook's software developer kit, a piece of code embedded in those apps. A spokeswoman confirmed that this was causing apps to crash.
• Several apps including Spotify and PUBG said on Friday morning that they had managed to resolve the issue.
• Technical issues with Facebook also caused a similar problem in May that affected Spotify, Tinder, Venmo, and Bumble.

Spotify, Pinterest, Tinder, and other popular apps crashed for at least two hours on Friday morning for many iOS users thanks to a Facebook bug.

Facebook later said it had resolved the issues.

Business Insider — along with several Twitter users — noticed early on Friday that the Spotify iPhone app crashed on opening.

People on social media also spotted similar issues with Pinterest, Tinder, PUBG Mobile, Mario Kart, and many others.

The problems did not affect Android users. It isn't clear how many iOS users experienced the outage.

The issues stemmed from Facebook's iOS software developer kit, or SDK, embedded in some of these apps. The SDK allows you to, for example, log into services using your Facebook account.

On its developer platform, Facebook acknowledged that a bug in its SDK was "causing some apps to crash." A Facebook spokeswoman also confirmed there were issues to Business Insider.

An app developer consulted by Business Insider also confirmed that Facebook had been the cause of the issues. He showed us that selectively dropping traffic going to Facebook's servers from Spotify's app allowed Spotify to open and function as normal.

Later Friday morning, apps including Spotify and PUBG Mobile said they had resolved the issue and were back online.

Facebook also said in an update mid-morning that the issues had been resolved. A spokeswoman said: "Earlier today, a code change triggered crashes for some iOS apps using the Facebook SDK. We identified the issue quickly and resolved it. We apologize for any inconvenience."

This is the second time in recent months that a bug in Facebook's SDK has tanked popular iOS apps. In May, a similar problem took down Spotify, TikTok, Tinder, and a bunch of other high-profile services down for some users.