BSXPCMessage received error for message: Connection interrupted

The message you are getting is due to a CIFilter bug in iOS 8.

XPC Services are meant to reduce crashes by isolating less stable components such as filters and plugins. This is usually not fatal and the connection will be restored by launchd restarting the service. Since this is not a long running service, but simply an operation, chances are that your image filter is not actually being applied.

This is very much a bug in iOS 8, and you should file a Radar (bug report) to let Apple know that (yet another piece of) iOS 8 has a bug.

If you are going to do that, you should install Quick Radar, keep track of the Radar number, and reply to the many other similar questions on Stack Overflow with the same issue. Encourage other people to file a duplicate Radar report referencing your original issue. That will give the bug more attention at Apple.

Apple really rushed this one out. The previously mentioned workaround is fine if you can make a different CIFilter subclass do what you want. Otherwise, you will just have to tinker around with copying the image, saving its NSData representation, or otherwise removing it from the CIImage workflow in some other way.

From reading a raywenderlich article, I found that adding an option to the context, so that rendering is done in the CPU rather than the GPU, will remove the warning.

let context = CIContext(options:[kCIContextUseSoftwareRenderer : true])

For me the issue was occurring when I would try to use CIFilters in iOS8+ for some reason?

I added some code to check iOS version and if it was greater than 7.9.9 I would use a CIFilter substitute that's iOS8+ like: https://stackoverflow.com/a/24083728/2057171

On a separate side-note, xCode6 had removed CIFilter framework from my project altogether (strange), but adding it back didn't fix this crash...