About the WilliApps Outage on December 18

WilliWidgets, WilliStudy, and WilliDreams Syncing services, along with other essential online services have went down on December 18 due to a security vulnerability that needed to be patched. All data is safe and nothing was compromised. 

A hacker, or someone with a ton of content curated in the apps could cause major slowdowns for all other users, and could go over our quota limit, which could have ultimately charged the developers a lot of money. 

Thankfully, this vulnerability was found inside of the open sourced version of WilliDreams and was not actively exploited, only thankfully found by an anonymous individual, but it also impacts WilliWidgets and WilliStudy. 

The main contents of WilliWidgets v4.2.3 and WilliStudy v4.2.1 are as follows:

• Fixed a security vulnerability where WilliApps could be rate limited

• Improved reliability of syncing inside of WilliApps

Because this vulnerability is very major, in order to continue using syncing, you must update to the latest versions of WilliApps. 

WilliDreams is still impacted, and an update will be released to WilliDreams soon despite support ending for WilliDreams. WilliDreams Open will also gain an update on its GitHub repo. We recommend at this time turning off all incoming traffic from WilliDreams Open in Firebase if you don't want to go over your quota limit.

Other minor bug fixes were also fixed before the vulnerability was found, and both apps got these patches in the most recent updates:

WilliWidgets:

• Fixed an issue with the Santa Tracker on watchOS and on the iPhone Lock Screen where it would always show the incorrect content

• Fixed an issue where events, themes, and other in-app content could re-appear after a certain amount of time after deleting them

WilliStudy:

• Reliability improvements with WilliStudy Passed leading into 2026

The Future (From Will)

Humans aren't perfect, and the outage is a direct result of humans not being perfect. I am thankful that this vulnerability was found early on and was not exploited at all, even if I had to stay up past my bedtime to fix this. WilliApps have always had the design philosophy of striving for perfection or do not ship it. While yes, humans cannot create perfect products, we try our best to get it as close as we can. This was a major learning point. Back during my Roblox days, I have always heard the saying "Dont trust the client". Because this was a client sided fix with new server sided implementation, I can condifently say that we have learned our lesson and that we will rely on the server for stuff that should be ran on the server.