libffi.so.7 not found after Linux update

Issue

I recently ran a global update of my system by executing

sudo pacman -Syu

One of my work pyenv environments contained scipy==1.5.4
Running import scipy.ndimage as nd produced this error:

ImportError: libffi.so.7: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Which meant that the recent Linux update removed libffi version 7 from the system.

Solution

The solution was just to install the version I needed

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/libffi7.git
cd libffi7
makepkg -si

I found this solution initially on lakur’s website: https://lakur.tech/2021/10/21/arch-linux-cannot-find-shared-library-libffi-so-7/