Google Fixes Firebase Analytics Issue That Crashed Thousands of iOS Apps at Launch

A Google Analytics for Firebase issue caused thousands of iOS apps to crash on launch before Google rolled out a fix later the same evening.

Google said the issue began Monday at 5:41 p.m. PDT and that it had fully rolled out a fix by 7:52 p.m. PDT, with no SDK updates required from developers, as summarized in a Google engineer’s timeline highlighted by 9to5Google. Google also said that, because of caching behavior, some app instances could continue crashing for up to four hours after the fix was completed.

That meant the problem could linger temporarily even after Google had addressed the underlying issue. Later coverage said affected apps should no longer be crashing, and no action was required from developers (MacRumors, 9to5Google).

What went wrong

Reporting on the incident said the fault was on Google’s end and involved an incorrectly formatted payload received by the SDK (9to5Google).

That helps explain why so many unrelated apps appeared to fail around the same time. Firebase is widely used across iPhone and iPad apps for analytics and backend tooling, so a problem in a shared Google component affected a large number of apps (Android Authority).

How widespread it was

Reports described the impact as unusually broad. Android Authority wrote that the bug caused thousands of iOS apps to start crashing and said some apps saw crash numbers more than 5,000 times higher than normal. Later reporting said some developers were seeing tens of thousands of crashes, and in some cases more, from users of a single app (Android Authority, 9to5Google).

The timing also appears to have created confusion because the issue started shortly after Apple released iOS 27.0.1. But MacRumors reported that the overlap was coincidental, noting that apps were also crashing on other iOS versions, pointing back to Firebase rather than Apple’s update.