Overview
- Developers raised alarms on Firebase’s GitHub after apps began failing to launch, with the incident starting at 5:41 p.m. Pacific on Monday and crash reports spiking within minutes.
- Google traced the fault to an incorrectly formatted payload sent to the Analytics for Firebase iOS SDK that caused the SDK to fail when parsing the server reply.
- Google deployed a server-side fix by 7:52 p.m. Pacific the same evening so no SDK or app updates were needed, though cached responses made some app instances keep crashing for up to four hours and those cleared by about 11:52 p.m. Pacific.
- The impact was broad: thousands of iPhone and iPad apps were affected and some developers recorded tens of thousands of crash reports, while Android apps were not hit because the bug impacted only the iOS SDK.
- The outage underscores the operational risk of centralized third-party services since developers and users could not fix the problem locally and coverage says Google will monitor the situation and follow up with a postmortem.