Apple has issued an apology for the Group FaceTime privacy bug which forced the company to shut down the new feature as they worked to find a patch for the problem.
A software update will be released in the coming days that will fix the bug which allowed users to listen in on a Group FaceTime participant before they even answered the call.
Here is Apple’s statement:
“We have fixed the Group FaceTime security bug on Apple’s servers and we will issue a software update to re-enable the feature for users next week.
“We thank the Thompson family for reporting the bug.
“We sincerely apologize to our customers who were affected and all who were concerned about this security issue.
“We appreciate everyone’s patience as we complete this process.
“We want to assure our customers that as soon as our engineering team became aware of the details necessary to reproduce the bug, they quickly disabled Group FaceTime and began work on the fix.“We are committed to improving the process by which we receive and escalate these reports, in order to get them to the right people as fast as possible.
“We take the security of our products extremely seriously and we are committed to continuing to earn the trust Apple customers place in us.”
The Thompson family mentioned in the statement were one of the first to discover and report the bug to Apple.
The software update – likely to be iOS 12.1.4 – will be available in the coming days.
Regular one-to-one FaceTime has been unaffected and can still be used.
