The internet gods are angry at us — or maybe everyone staying at home and watching YouTube finally broke the internet. Either way, a number of users are reporting difficulties with accessing a wide variety of apps, some of which include Spotify, The New York Times, Pinterest, and TikTok.
Downdetector’s stats for Spotify, for example, report a peak of 36,633 reports at 7:11 PM Eastern Time. Pinterest and PUBG have similarly garnered heights of 6,386 and 1,275 complaints within the last hour or so. The troubles all seem to have begun at 6:30 PM ET, suggesting an infrastructural issue is likely to blame.
It’s something related between the Facebook SDK for iOS and their servers. There’s currently a discussion on their code repository about the issue.
It seems they reverted the change but it still happening.https://t.co/sYo3QlT1ye
— João Leite (@_JotapePL) May 6, 2020
As @_JotaPL reports on Twitter, the fault may somehow lie with Facebook, with a number of complaints on the GitHub page for the Facebook SDK for iOS also referring to outages with their apps. One of the company’s engineers quickly chimed in to say that the server-side change had already been reverted and that the crashes should go away soon as the change propagates to all servers.
Looking at the Downdetector page for TikTok, that certainly seems to be accurate, as the number of complaints reporting outages with the Chinese app went down from 36,000+ at 6:56 PM ET to just 1,580 at 7:35 PM ET. Hopefully, this means all the other apps affected by the outage will also be up and running soon.
