Users of our Guardian iPhone app have experienced loading issues over the past 12 hours so I wanted to write a short note - first to apologise and second to alert all our users to a fix.
First, the problem.
Our app works by using a series of 'tags' to determine how to display content. So, for example, galleries are produced and published with a 'gallery' tag which allows our audience to delve instantly into that content type, and also provides a simple way for us to feed content into our various products appropriately.
Unfortunately, last night we accidentally forgot to tag an article containing a Flickr Flash interactive with the 'interactive' tag. We ordinarily strip any 'interactives' out as they cannot be displayed on an iPhone. As a result our iPhone app was attempting to pull this into our gallery carousel. The results weren't good.
All users who attempted to open the app during the hours of 23.00BST and 10.30BST (Tuesday 11 May - Wednesday 12 May) would have seen the app loading screen followed by a crash. We appreciate this is frustrating in the extreme, particularly on a news day such as today.
We have since fixed the issue. The second problem is that because the app is crashing at such an early stage it is not updating the feed. This, again, means that users will continue to experience problems.
It goes without saying that we are working on a fix that we will upload to Apple today. However, in the meantime, the app can be updated simply by deleting and reinstalling. Please note - you will not be charged again should you do this.
We fully appreciate how frustrating this is, particularly to users as engaged as our iPhone audience are. We have been consistently amazed by the number of people using the app, the frequency of visits and the positive response since we launched in December 2009.
I hope that this brief problem has not dented your enjoyment of our content too much and rest assured we are putting plans in place to ensure this does not happen again.
Thank you again for all your support since we launched app. We realise this is a serious issue and I would like to apologies again for the problems over the past 12 hours.
Please do email me at jonathon.moore@guardian.co.uk if you have any further thoughts or issues you wish to discuss.
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