If some of your favorite iPhone apps were crashing Monday night, you were not alone. An issue with Google’s Firebase meant thousands of iPhone apps were crashing overnight, but a fix has already been applied, reports 9to5Google.
The issue was on Google’s end with an “incorrectly formatted payload” for the SDK. While you might not expect a Google issue to cause widespread issues on your iPhone, it’s easier to believe than you might think. Google’s Firebase is a tool used by both Android and iOS developers, meaning it has its claws in thousands of apps. While the impact was huge, developers had no way of fixing it, as it required a fix on Google’s end. Some developers saw tens of thousands of crashes being reported from their app’s users.
All should be well now, as Google has confirmed that a fix has been rolled out.
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.
The patch for this problem was fully rolled out by around midnight Pacific Time last night, and affected apps should now be fully working.