A catastrophic Unity Ads bug crashed most iOS games using the SDK in August, denting developers’ ad revenue significantly.
It was logged as a ‘major incident’ by Unity on August 15 2024, and resolved the same day with a rollback. We spoke to several developers affected by the outage, who said the incident cost them vital ad revenue and shook their fragile confidence in Unity again, following the messy Runtime Fee fiasco.
We also obtained the apology email sent out to all affected developers, signed by Unity’s chief revenue officer Nadav Ashkenazy. It reads: “We apologize for the disruption to your business. We are conducting a full, in-depth investigation to understand how this occurred and make improvements to our processes to help prevent such incidents in the future.”
“We take our responsibility to provide reliable technology that powers your business very seriously,” Ashkenazy’s email continues. “We are committed to creating technology you can trust now and in the future, and we’ll continue to share details with you as we investigate further.”
One developer we spoke to about the incident said: “In my 15 plus years in games I’ve never seen an over-the-air SDK crash apps at launch. Developers were not notified so we scrambled to figure out what we did wrong; but it turns out it wasn’t even under our control.”
“AppLovin shut off Unity as a source, fixing the problem for all MAX users,” they continued. “The financial and reputation impact for Unity must be significant and begs the question: what the f**k is going on over there?”
Another well-known game-maker said: “How this bug was able to enter into a live environment from a publicly listed company is beyond me. Some expensive lessons were learned that day. I’m sure the big publishers were compensated for their losses, but sadly we were not.”
A third anonymous source added: “I can’t believe that Unity didn’t conduct a thorough test before releasing the product update. The company needs serious improvements on management.”
Unity later sent out a second apology following the incident, this time from individual account managers. One part read: “While issues like this are an extreme rarity, we are deeply committed to learning from it to continually improve our processes to maintain the highest standards for release quality.”
We have asked Unity reps for comment on this article and will update this story if or when they respond.
Unity is currently on a charm offensive with the launch of Unity 6 and new leadership in place. It follows a disastrous run kickstarted in September 2023 with the announcement of the infamous Runtime Fee, which prompted a developer boycott.
We were told at the time that part of the motivation behind the Runtime Fee policy was to force developers onto Unity’s LevelPlay mediation platform in a bid to ‘kill’ rival AppLovin. Our sources later also revealed that the Runtime Fee policy was “rushed out”, with one major partner apparently telling then-CEO Riccitiello: “Fuck you, we’re not paying”.
Unity’s new CEO Matthew Bromberg was unveiled in May, and following a string of executive departures, the Runtime Fee policy was officially declared dead last month.
