Google has fixed an issue that caused thousands of iPhone apps to crash overnight

An issue with Google’s Firebase left thousands of iPhone apps crashing overnight, but a fix has already been applied.

If you found apps on your iPhone or iPad were crashing last night, you’re not alone. Google confirmed last night that an issue with Analytics for Firebase was causing crashes when apps tried to launch. The issue was on Google’s end with an “incorrectly formatted payload” for the SDK.

You wouldn’t think of Google when a widespread crashing issue surfaces on iPhone, but Firebase is a valuable tool for developers on both Android and iOS, and is integrated into thousands of apps. The crashing issue was out of the developer’s hands and required a fix on Google’s end. The impact was huge, with some developers seeing tens of thousands of crashes – some far more – from their app’s users.

That fix has already been rolled out, Google confirmed.

Nick Cooke, a software engineer at Google, summarized a timeline of events:

• Starting on Monday, 2026-09-28 at 17:41 US/PDT. Google Analytics for Firebase iOS+ experienced an issue causing crashes on launch due to an incorrectly formatted payload received by the SDK.
• We fully rolled out a fix by Monday, 2026-09-28 at 19:52 US/PDT.
• No SDK updates are required on your end to apply this fix.
• Due to caching behavior, some app instances may still experience crashes for up to 4 hours after the rollout completed. These remaining cases should automatically resolve themselves by 2026-09-28 at 23:52 US/PDT.

At this point, crashing issues should be resolved. The patch for this problem was fully rolled out by around midnight Pacific Time last night; no app updates needed. Affected apps should be fully working again at this point.

Follow Ben: Twitter/X, Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram