Google fixes firebase bug that crashed thousands of iPhone apps

Thousands of iPhone and iPad users watched apps crash on launch overnight, and the cause was traced back not to any single developer but to Google itself. An issue with Analytics for Firebase, a tool integrated into thousands of iOS and Android apps, triggered widespread crashes before Google rolled out a fix within hours.

Google confirmed the problem stemmed from an incorrectly formatted payload sent to the Firebase SDK, causing apps that rely on it to crash immediately upon launch. Because Firebase is embedded so broadly across the app ecosystem, the issue wasn't isolated to one or two apps.

It hit any developer using the affected SDK, regardless of how well-built their own code was, since the fault sat entirely on Google's end.

Developers reported the damage was significant. Some saw tens of thousands of crash reports flooding in from their user base overnight, with certain developers reporting numbers even higher than that.

For affected apps, the crashes were entirely out of developers' control and impossible to patch from their side.

Nick Cooke, a software engineer from Google, outlined an extensive timeline regarding the problem. The problems started Monday, September 28, at 5:41 pm Pacific Time, while the full fix was deployed by 7:52 pm on the same day.

No SDK update was necessary from the developer’s end for deploying the fix. However, owing to caching behaviour, there were some instances where the app crashed for up to four more hours after deployment, and those cases would be sorted out automatically by 11:52 pm Pacific Time.