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posted by martyb on Sunday July 12 2020, @03:48AM   Printer-friendly

Facebook code change caused outage for Spotify, Pinterest and Waze apps – TechCrunch:

If you're an iPhone user, odds are fairly good you spent a frustrating portion of the morning attempting to reopen apps. I know my morning walk was dampened by the inability to fire up Spotify. Plenty of other users reported similar issues with a number of apps, including Pinterest and Waze.

The issue has since been resolved, with Facebook noting that the problem rests firmly on its shoulders. A log page notes a sudden spike in errors stemming from Facebook's iOS SDK, dating back several hours.

[...] "Earlier today, a code change triggered crashes for some iOS apps using the Facebook SDK," the developer team writes. "We identified the issue quickly and resolved it. We apologize for any inconvenience."

[...] After the second major issue in recent memory, it's easy to imagine many reconsidering their relationship with the social network — after all, a bad experience can put people off an app entirely, as social media debates around Apple Music versus Spotify appeared to point to this morning. Many users will ultimately place the blame at the feet of a given app, rather than a third-party SDK that caused the crash.

A detailed timeline and very readable analysis of what happened is available at Bugsnag:

Some key takeaways

  1. Now the issue is, this absolutely should not crash an application. One of the tenets of good SDK design is that SDKs SHOULD NEVER CRASH THE APP.
  2. Defensive programming, and better handling of malformed data from the server could have meant that instead of crashing the application, the facebook initialization could have just been skipped, or better still, fall back to some kind of default settings if the server responds with junk data.
  3. Additionally, by having some kind of API data validation in place, this situation could have been avoided entirely. Services like Runscope offer this.

See, also: Robustness Principle.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by SomeGuy on Sunday July 12 2020, @05:24AM (21 children)

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Sunday July 12 2020, @05:24AM (#1019738)

    I know my morning walk was dampened by the inability to fire up Spotify.

    If your morning walk involves a freaking cell phone, or fucking facebook, you are doing it wrong. And stupid.

    "apps" that depend on some facebook internet API, probably for spying? Crashing is the least of your problems, but you don't see it.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Interesting=1, Informative=2, Total=3
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @05:47AM (12 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @05:47AM (#1019741)

    Harsh. What's wrong with some exercise music?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @06:00AM (7 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @06:00AM (#1019744)

      My Android phone is for calls and texts. All that other bat shit is removed or disabled. It's nice. Hardly ever use it. You iPhone users are pussies.

      • (Score: 2, Touché) by Zinnia Zirconium on Sunday July 12 2020, @06:08AM (6 children)

        by Zinnia Zirconium (11163) on Sunday July 12 2020, @06:08AM (#1019747) Homepage Journal

        Harley Quinn: "Pussies are powerful. They birthed all of humanity!"

        Android, iPhone, both suck in slightly different ways.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @03:03PM (5 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @03:03PM (#1019847)

          Pussies are not strong. They are rather weak because they are always getting screwed by dicks.

          108 billion humans so far have existed on this earth, past and present.
          Say it takes twenty attempts on average to become pregnant.
          108 x 20 =2160 billion! In order to create 108B humans, pussies got screwed by dick 2.160 TRILLION times!

          Now add in purely recreational intercourse then the total number of times that pussies were screwed by dicks would be in the QUADRILLIONS.

          • (Score: 1) by Zinnia Zirconium on Sunday July 12 2020, @03:20PM

            by Zinnia Zirconium (11163) on Sunday July 12 2020, @03:20PM (#1019855) Homepage Journal

            I was a C-section.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @04:40PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @04:40PM (#1019890)

            Read it in Bill Nye's voice.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @05:47PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @05:47PM (#1019918)

            Why would it take 20 attempts? If both participants are at the prime breeding age, they won't take more than 1 or 2 unless they're really genetically incompatible.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @09:04PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @09:04PM (#1020018)

              5% is about the chance of pregnancy from a single act of intercourse at prime breeding age on a random day. The chance rises in the days before ovulation.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2020, @01:52PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2020, @01:52PM (#1020297)

            I think you will find the dicks are getting screwed by the pussies.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @06:46AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @06:46AM (#1019757)

      Harsh. What's wrong with some exercise music?

      True - but now you've moved the conversation to what platform. Sir, do you personally like listening to adverts during your workout?

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by maxwell demon on Sunday July 12 2020, @10:07AM (2 children)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday July 12 2020, @10:07AM (#1019784) Journal

      Nothing. My MP3 player handles that just fine. Without connecting to facebook, interjecting ads, or allowing anyone to track me.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @04:45PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @04:45PM (#1019892)

        We discontinued your MP3 player, and there are no replacement parts.

        • (Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday July 12 2020, @09:39PM

          by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Sunday July 12 2020, @09:39PM (#1020030)

          We discontinued your MP3 player, and there are no replacement parts.

          Meh. They're a dime a dozen. Easy enough to find a replacement. When your phone gets discontinued, a replacement can cost 100's of dollars. Your apps can come and go without warning even on your current phone.

          And for Zarquon's sake, you're outside. pay attention and listen to the world around you. It could save your life, or maybe you'll learn something.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @06:08AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @06:08AM (#1019748)

    These are addicts.

    Music addiction.

    It is required lest their life be detrimentally impacted. They _need_ it to function in society. It is an addiction.

    It's a hell of a curse on those of us who do _not_ like continuous, incessant noise.

    • (Score: 1) by Zinnia Zirconium on Sunday July 12 2020, @06:16AM

      by Zinnia Zirconium (11163) on Sunday July 12 2020, @06:16AM (#1019750) Homepage Journal

      I can quit anytime I want.

      (Save me, Ava Max!)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @06:48AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @06:48AM (#1019759)

      Silence is just another boring-ass fetish. You're like the rarified friend that can only listen to Beethoven piano Sonatas. Oh you didn't know? You do now.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @10:41AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @10:41AM (#1019786)

        Do you have any Beethoven Sonatas? Do you know where I can get some? It's been a long time, I'm really jonesing for some Ludwig, man!!

  • (Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Sunday July 12 2020, @03:31PM (3 children)

    by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Sunday July 12 2020, @03:31PM (#1019859) Journal

    theres a hundred reasons to use none of these companies, or the iphone, and this only reinforces 1000 facts we already know.

    Why do people keep using and accepting these devices betray them?

    Is it because the danger is too abstract? Or is it because the stories of those whose lives have been nearly ruined by government and corporate oppression using these tactics, just not getting out?

    both, and a lot of propaganda.

    https://archive.is/OVPeT [archive.is]
    https://archive.is/7YNX0 [archive.is]

    • (Score: 1) by Zinnia Zirconium on Sunday July 12 2020, @03:58PM (2 children)

      by Zinnia Zirconium (11163) on Sunday July 12 2020, @03:58PM (#1019873) Homepage Journal

      Network effect. Everybody uses it because everybody uses it.

      Even if you don't care how many people use it, which I don't, Spotify might have a collection of 50 million songs, and that's nice I guess, if it's true.

      (I'm skeptical of collection size because there's a rumor that Jango has 30 million songs, but the rumor was never true, and the actual number is 2.5 million.)

      • (Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Sunday July 12 2020, @04:23PM

        by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Sunday July 12 2020, @04:23PM (#1019881) Journal

        functioning link: https://archive.is/UUt9W [archive.is]

        sorry about that.

        network effect sounds, and feels, a lot to me like the lemming effect, or stampede effect. You have ever reason not to trust these people, but you have this overwhelming feeling that you should not care about that and do what everyone else is doing, and you are consciously afraid of being the one to have to raise a concern, or be the one without their status symbol/pacifier/suckertoy

        For me the switch from "i dont want to be on camera all the time" to "i have a god given right to point my cell phone camera at you 3 inches from your face in the bus" happened overnight, and I will never understand how.

      • (Score: 1) by Zinnia Zirconium on Sunday July 12 2020, @04:27PM

        by Zinnia Zirconium (11163) on Sunday July 12 2020, @04:27PM (#1019884) Homepage Journal

        OK. Network effect and narcissism.

        I’m a huge fan of Spotify, and particularly Discover Weekly. Why? It makes me feel seen. It knows my musical tastes better than any person in my entire life ever has, and I’m consistently delighted by how satisfyingly just right it is every week, with tracks I probably would never have found myself or known I would like.

        It's scary how well @Spotify Discover Weekly playlists know me. Like former-lover-who-lived-through-a-near-death experience-with-me well.

        At this point @Spotify's discover weekly knows me so well that if it proposed I'd say yes

        In actuality, this matrix you see here is gigantic. Each row represents one of Spotify’s 140 million users — if you use Spotify, you yourself are a row in this matrix — and each column represents one of the 30 million songs in Spotify’s database.

        How Does Spotify Know You So Well? [medium.com]

        Somehow being a row in a matrix with 140 million others makes certain people feel seen.