Tinder, Pinterest crash on iPhones due to Facebook bug 

iOS devices faced non access to a number of popular apps and services including Spotify, Pinterest, and Tinder due to a now-resolved issue involving Facebook log-ins.

The cause of the outages seems to have been Facebook’s software development kit, or SDK, which many apps use to manage user logins. Users do not have to be using Facebook to log into an app for this to affect their software (they do not even have to have it installed), and there were no reports of the same apps crashing on Android. Facebook acknowledged on its developer platform that its software was causing problems.

“We are aware and investigating an increase in errors on the iOS SDK which is causing some apps to crash,” said the firm. In a GitHub thread posted around 7AM ET, numerous developers reported problems with their apps and blamed Facebook, too.

By around 9.30AM ET, though, most users were reporting that the apps were working again, and by 10.30AM ET Facebook had marked the issue as “resolved.”

“Earlier today, a code change triggered crashes for some iOS apps using the Facebook SDK,” a company spokesperson told by email. “We identified the issue quickly and resolved it. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

The annoyance from developers and users was justified, though, considering that this isn’t the first time that Facebook’s SDK has knocked out a large number of apps. A near-identical problem occurred on May 6th and affected dozens of services for a good chunk of the day.

As app developer Guilherme Rambo told us at the time, the root of the issue is that Facebook encourages developers to integrate its log-in services into their apps by offering them valuable insights about app usage and advertising in return.

Every time a user opens an app using the SDK, it makes a call to Facebook’s servers in preparation to authenticate any logins.