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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.


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  • (Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Sunday July 12 2020, @03:44PM (2 children)

    by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Sunday July 12 2020, @03:44PM (#1019869) Journal

    the phone itself is just as bad

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

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 14 2020, @04:38AM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday July 14 2020, @04:38AM (#1021049) Homepage
    Erm...

      One more step
    Please complete the security check to access

    Why do I have to complete a CAPTCHA?
    Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property.

    What can I do to prevent this in the future?
    If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware.
    If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices.

    ... no thanks.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Tuesday July 14 2020, @05:31PM

      by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Tuesday July 14 2020, @05:31PM (#1021366) Journal

      yes the most central archive server of the internet, the only place you can post an image with any certainty it will not go offline in the near future, is constantly under attack so has to use crapcha that annoys everyone.

      I did not make the world this way, it is this way because my recommendations have been ignored.

      So here it is someplace that is so small it wont be captchad but also so small it might go offline at any time:
      https://0bin.net/paste/A5lORfPYM--t4Rs7#wakNhscLXrIOMprk0yyOK0x-8VKFx0MbulhZt5MxyCT [0bin.net]

      That said my site is a place you will find a ton of things in one place making archive server unnecessary, but my site may go down in a couple months if i go homeless. So Iam paying to have them there myself, because no one has yet contributed to my work. Because people are hypnotized to think work is only what someone else has already paid someone else to do, and so anyone who is poor cant possibly be working.

      "if my contribution would matter, the effort must be hopeless" and so rich shills run the internet.