A bug on Apple’s News app resulted in notifications of one particular CNN news report being sent to iPad and iPhone repeatedly on Tuesday afternoon. Some users were alerted up to 100 times with the same notification.
Revealed via a barrage of complaints that made their appearance on Twitter, reddit and public forums, the problem lasted for around 15 minutes. It seemed to affect every Apple News subscriber who had activated alerts for CNN.
It was not immediately obvious who the culprit was: Apple or CNN. The latter, however, very quickly declared on Twitter that it was Apple’s fault. The news organisation claimed that it only sent out one notification, adding that it was working with Apple to determine the cause of the issue.
The CNN tweet said: “We are aware that some Apple News users recently received multiples of the same alert. Our server log shows CNN sent only one. We are working with Apple to identify their issue, as users on CNN-owned platforms did not experience a problem. Apologies to those who did.”
Users affected by the repeated notifications bug received somewhere in the region of a hundred copies of the same report. The glitch became so bad that this interrupted the normal functioning of many devices.
CNN’s claim that the responsibility for the fault lies with Apple is supported by the fact that reports have also started to emerge which claim that Fox news notifications were also repeated in the same manner.
The only way to solve the problem was to switch off Apple News notifications completely, although some users tweeted that they were still getting notifications despite turning off the alert.
To Apple’s credit, the issue was fixed quickly, which means that if you own one of the affected devices it is now safe to enable news notifications again.