Today, Apple users and developers are experiencing some major downtime. Apple services are known to experience stability problems at times. And there is the occasional intentional downtime for the Apple store ahead of new products coming. But I don’t remember any time when that many systems were affected for such a long duration.
After waiting for slightly longer than usual to get beta testing approval for a new prod.ly hot fix release, I was anxious to send the invite to the beta testers. I also felt inspired to try to maybe get a few more people on board for testing:
Prod.ly 1.0.2 beta test approved after 2 days, now out to Testflight beta testers. Still got 970 spaces left if you like to have a look.
A couple of people heard my call and send me their IDs, but before I could add them all I started to get errors on iTunes connect. The list of testers was suddenly empty.
Sometimes, when I cannot log into iTC, it helps to delete the Safari history and cookies. But not this time. I couldn’t even log in any more. At the time of this writing this was 11 hours ago.
Apple provides two status pages which were showing the extend of the issue:
- Apple Services, Stores, and iCloud – those are the front end user-facing services
- System Status – those are services mostly of interest to developers
One key piece seem to be affected, user authentication. This was Apple’s description of the problem:
Customers may have been unable to make purchases from the App Store, iTunes Store, iBooks Store, or Mac App Store.
We are – naturally – giggling at the use of the little word “may” here. For iTunes Connect and TestFlight, the description was:
Users are experiencing a problem with the service listed above.
Again, let’s giggle, this time about “experiencing a problem”. Oh Apple…
Well finally, 11 hours later all services have been restored and I was able to upload and distribute the new prod.ly beta to my testers. One interesting question to be asked is whether or not Apple could be held accountable for loss of sales during the many hours users were unable to purchase any apps. But then again … who would bite the hand that feeds you, right?
All giggling aside, we would very much like to know what issue could have caused such an enormous downtime. Was it a hacker attack? Last dying breath of WebObjects? Hardware failure? Hopefully something that Apple can prevent from happening in the future.
Categories: Apple
