If your iPhone apps started glitching out last night, don’t blame Apple: A Google bug caused widespread iPhone app crashes Monday before the company rolled out a fix.
The crashes began shortly after Apple released iOS 27.0.1, but the problem stemmed from Google’s servers, not Apple’s update.
Google Firebase glitch triggers iPhone app crashes
Your iPhone doesn’t need to install an update to suddenly become a crash machine. That’s the unnerving lesson from Monday night’s widespread app failures. A glitch in Firebase, Google’s backend platform that many software developers use for authentication, cloud storage and other features, caused iPhone and iPad apps to crash on launch.
The incident shows just how interconnected modern software has become. It also serves as a stark reminder that a single piece of third-party infrastructure can bring down an app, without Apple, the developer or the user changing a thing.
Google software engineer Nick Cooke posted a timeline of the problem Monday evening on GitHub. He wrote that Google Analytics for Firebase caused apps to crash on launch. The trigger was seemingly an “incorrectly formatted payload” received by Firebase’s software development kit for iOS. Since thousands of apps rely on Firebase, the fallout was pretty broad.
The problem started at 5:41 p.m. Pacific on Monday, with Google rolling out the fix almost two hours later at 7:52 p.m. Thankfully, developers didn’t need to do anything to get their apps working again. Cooke said no SDK updates were required to apply the fix.
However, caching meant some apps kept crashing, with some still failing up to four hours after the rollout. These cases were cleared by 11:52 p.m. Pacific.
Developers raised the alarm on GitHub
Developers began flagging the problem Monday evening on Google’s Firebase GitHub page. One developer alone reported 56 crashes in the first 18 minutes. That app had shipped no update, and four released builds were hit at the same time.
The crashes came just after the SDK received a reply from the Google server, according to that report. The developer said he suspected a bad experiment payload parsed into a nik key.
Apple’s update wasn’t the culprit
The timing of the iPhone app crashes made iOS 27.0.1 look guilty. Apple’s bug-fix update landed Monday, right before the crashes began. But reports show apps also crashed on other iOS versions, a key that pointed away from the software update.
The crashes hit iPhone and iPad apps alike. Firebase also runs on Android, but this particular bug affected only the iOS SDK.
If any of your iPhone apps began crashing Monday night, they should work normally now. No app update is needed.
