• 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.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

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

In some cases, the issues appeared to be resolved.

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

People on social media 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 told Business Insider: "We're aware that some applications are currently affected by an issue in our Facebook iOS SDK. We're working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible."

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

Facebook didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for an update. Apple declined to comment.

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.