Last night, a bunch of iOS apps started lagging, crashing, or weren’t starting at all, and these include staples like Spotify, TikTok, Venmo, Tinder, and many others we can obviously not live without.

One look at the Downdetector site will show a widespread spike starting late last night, and continuing well until early morning and even now with a bunch of apps and services. Spotify acknowledged the issue, and said they are working on it, subsequently posting a green light about 5 hours ago that everything should be back to normal. Unfortuantely, it is still not for plenty of users.

Why are Spotify and TikTok down?

What happened, and how could so many disparate services be experiencing issues all at the same time?  Well, the common culprit seems to be… Facebook. That’s right but not just the Facebook login which is used for easy entry into many apps and services now.

Yep, Facebook’s advertising and data mining machine is a force to be reckoned with, so if you haven’t yet disassociated your account from any third-party tracking in the Facebook settings, you might want to do it now, tailored “for you” ads be damned. Not that it’s going to help with your current TikTok outage, but that, too, shall pass.