Firebase Analytics server payload crashed iOS apps on launch for six hours

Sources: issue, HN discussion
Summary: From 2026-09-29 00:41 UTC, Google Analytics for Firebase iOS+ served an incorrectly formatted experiment payload that parsed into a nil dictionary key, crashing apps on launch with NSInvalidArgumentException within a second of the sdk-exp fetch. Reporters saw already-released builds start crashing simultaneously across multiple app versions without shipping any update. Google marked the issue p0 and states it was fully resolved at 2026-09-28 23:52 US/PDT, which is 2026-09-29 06:52 UTC, through a server-side fix that requires no SDK update. Every fact here comes from the GitHub issue, because the Firebase status dashboard showed no incident on any service for this window.
Why it matters: A vendor configuration push took down shipped, unmodified binaries, so no app-side release could have prevented it or fixed it while it ran.
Follow-up: Read the root-cause update Google says will follow, and note that crash-reporter latency means reports continued arriving after the server-side fix landed.