Firebase's Kill Switches Shipped Globally, and a Two-Line Cleanup Crashed iOS Apps

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 08:30:00 +0530

Firebase’s postmortem for the September 28 iOS outage contains one sentence that explains most of it: the flags the Google Analytics for Firebase SDK uses as kill switches are themselves “released globally”. A kill switch is supposed to be the safe, fast path for turning off a bad feature. Here the path that carries it had no staging, so the bad value went out to a wide population of apps.

Postmortem on Kuldeep Pisda

Firebase's Kill Switches Shipped Globally, and a Two-Line Cleanup Crashed iOS Apps