Good morning everyone! Experiencing problems with Safari on iOS and OS X today? Is Safari crashing when you tap the address bar? You’re not alone. Apple is experiencing a major issue with Safari today, causing the browser to reliably crash on all iOS devices, and Safari on OS X seems to suffer from UI problems and other issues. This one’s big, and seems to affect all iOS and OS X devices in the world (!).
The culprit seems to be Safari’s search suggestions implementation. Something seems to be wrong server-side, and it’s causing the search session code to raise an exception, after which the application doesn’t know what to do. Tapping the URL field in Safari will cause Safari on iOS to crash immediately, while Safari on OS X suffers from other issues. If you are not currently experiencing this problem on iOS, that’s because caching is saving you for now. If you switch airplane mode on and off on your iOS devices, these caches are reset, and the problem will appear.
From what I can gather – which means, from what iOS developers I talk to can gather, because I, myself, am an idiot – this is a huge problem, affecting all iOS and OS X devices. On my iPhone, the Safari crash is 100% reproducible, and any tap on the address field crashes Safari. I can’t type in any URL. A temporary workaround is to disable “Include search engine suggestions”, but a permanent fix most likely has to come from Apple itself. Even then, said hypothetical fix might take a while to actually fix the problem.
I was reading the news this morning without issues on an iPhone 6 with iOS 8.3. I just tried to tap that bar again and it works fine here. I’ve got DDG set as my default search.
Also switching on and off airplane mode doesn’t make it crash.
Edited 2016-01-27 10:22 UTC
Same. No issues all day on my 5S. Definitely does not affect everyone, or even the majority since I haven’t seen it on any major news site.
we have dozens of Mac in office and none is crashing, not even single ios device.
… and I just can’t look away.
Someone pass me the popcorn
Safari, Chrome (and many other browsers except Firefox) hang and crash after visiting crashsafari.com or any of its clone.
This became the new online grief all over the internet (twitter, facebook, …).
Nope here.
Chrome 48, visiting crashsafari.com “looks like” hanged. Just click on “x” to close the tab and the browser keeps running perfectly.
Edited 2016-01-27 11:46 UTC
Chrome on Android crashes.
Firefox doesn’t, though, on desktop or Android. It sort-of hangs, then offers to stop the script that’s causing the problems.
YES!! What is going on?!
I tried to set my iPhone 6S Plus with the latest OS 9.2.1 on flight mode to get it to crash, still it works… No problems. Albeit I mainly use Opera Coast. But switching to Safari doesn’t change anything. It also still works.
Maybe it will start crashing later on?
A good case example against monoculture. Our entire mobile lives depend on just two companies.
While worldwide accidents like this are very bad, imagine what could be done if we were actually at war.
Just my thoughts. If Android stock browser (or Chrome as it mostly is default nowadays) would do the same, then you would install Firefox or something else. While doing this you won’t have access to stuff stored in cloud (bookmarks et al), but mostly you will get your work done.
If there is major mess and also Google Play is down then you may install it from F-Droid (provided you have it already on your device).
So yes… choice and freedom are always better than monoculture. You just have to be able to use your freedom well.
Edited 2016-01-27 12:30 UTC
Ahh, failing to properly handle an exception.
I’m a bit of a perfectionist and that still occasionally trips me up when I miss an under-documented error case.
(One of the big reasons I have high hopes for Rust when I have time to properly experiment with it. The only exceptional outcomes that I may be unaware of are ones which the library developer considers so unrecoverable that the only safe thing to do is kill the process.)
Edited 2016-01-27 11:32 UTC
Another “sky is falling” re-post, moving on……..
Threw me for a loop this morning until I dug into the system diagnostics to figure out just what the hell was going on. Very, very nasty indeed. Someone probably should lose their job over this. At the very least there should be general exception handling in Safari, even if it were to just say “something happened.”
Edited 2016-01-27 13:24 UTC
Choose a search engine other than Google. Whatever’s causing the exception seems to have something to do with Google’s API.
Not a solution. Tried all the search providers, all crashes.
I stand corrected. It worked for me, however I’m glad to know it isn’t a sure solution. Worked for a few others I know as well. Thanks for that.
I’m not having any issues with iOS or OSX.
I am running the latest released code on both machines (no public beta or developer beta). 9.2.1 for iOS (on a iPhone 6) and 10.11.3 for OSX, on a 2013 Macbook Air (13 inch).
Make sure you have “Safari Suggestions” turned on. That’s the option that does it on my devices at the moment. If that’s on, down they go. Interestingly, I’m now able to leave search engine suggestions turned on as long as Safari suggestions are off. That was not the case this morning.
The 2009 MacBook Air I use at work for testing Safari isn’t having the problem either. Its running the latest El Capitan software updates too.
I have about 6 apple devices running and haven’t hit this crash yet, in fact my iOS devices haven’t crashed an app or been rebooted in months.
i didn’t apply the latest OS version and i usually term off a lot of the suggestion and active assistance sort of stuff, so maybe it’s just missing me.
then again my company has about 30 mac nerds and no one is chatting about it either, so not sure how widespread it is, but anytime an apple might lose data or butcher something it’s a pretty rare occasion and pretty serious.
If you’ve done that, it will miss you. It has to do specifically with the Safari suggestions search feature. I agree that these incidents with Apple are rare, but this one is big. It’s big enough to make the general news in my area and that is rare as hell for any tech-related problem.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/apple-says-it-has-fixed-the…
It certainly hasn’t happened to me on my iPhone 6+ or MBP. Good for Apple to figure out the issue.
Not quite. It’s not affecting my iPhone anymore, however my iPad is still crashing.
I’ve got 3 Macs, iPhone, and iPad – Zero problems with Safari. I guess I’m doing something wrong. I click on the address line and it isn’t crashing.
I’ve manually typed the address for osnews and Arstechica, Seattle Times and Seattle PI newspapers, Wired, Leftlane (car site) and multiple other sites on all of them and Safari isn’t crashing on me. So whatever the bug is it isn’t affecting me. So the sky is not falling … At least not for me.
PS: I’m writing this on an iPad and just did those on my iPad. Not crashing.
Edited 2016-01-27 17:28 UTC
I was reading about this on Safari this morning, but my browser didn’t crash a single time. Not sure what this is. I am using Google as default search engine.
I’ve got Siri Suggestions turned off – I like smartphones, but dislike smartassphones – so didn’t have a clue why there was such a fuss. Seems quite widespread, at least from the number articles on it in my feed.