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Apple iCloud Experiencing Issues
- envolt 7y agoI'm going to read all the conspiracy theories on this post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20345060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20345060 (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 3JPLW 7y agoYou know the old adage that celebrities die in threes? It's actually mathematically supported... or, well, it's supported that they die in 2.718s. Same principle would apply to cloud service outages if all the services and their failures were actually independent. We'd expect them to happen in "clusters" of e: http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/celebrities.html http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/celebrities.html I still love me a good conspiracy theory, but clustering of random (poisson) events is much more likely than you'd expect.
- emerongi 7y agoThat's calculated with the assumption that you can cluster the events within a 1-month period and that the events happen at a fixed rate. We are talking about a period of a few days here and about only a handful of services that tout 99.999(9)% uptime. I'm no mathematician but I don't think it's a great comparison.
- 3JPLW 7y agoNo the cluster size isn't fixed, nor is the event rate — the clusters are chosen purely based upon what an "unusually long" time between events would be. That's precisely how the rate ends up canceling itself out. Given this formulation, the expected cluster size is always e, regardless of how you define celebrity. That's what makes it fun. Now the human psychology part that this doesn't cover is that typically when you have two or three A-listers die, well, then you start seeing all the B- C- and D-listers that also died in the same period that you would have otherwise ignored.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- emerongi 7y agoCan you calculate the chance of the cluster size being >5 when we can cluster events within a one-week period and the rate of events is one every 2 months (debatable, but feels right to me)? I think that would just end this discussion. I don't know how to calculate that, but my intuition says the resulting chance is low.
- appleiigs 7y agoI don't know how to do the math, but my python simulation says zero. import random service_providers = 20 servers_threshold = 5 up_time_threshold = 0.999**7 # prob down in week years = 20 occurrences = 0 # run sim 10,000 times for i in range(0, 10000): servers_down = False # simulate weeks in 20 years for j in range(1, 52*years): how_many_down_this_week = 0 # run up times for service providers for s in range(0, service_providers): up_time = random.random() if up_time > up_time_threshold: how_many_down_this_week += 1 # did they go down? if how_many_down_this_week > servers_threshold: servers_down = True if servers_down == True: occurrences += 1 print(occurrences)
- joshuamorton 7y agoGiven those parameters, you'd expect to see something every 100,000 years or so. (poisson distribution, lambda=1/8, k=5, the result is like 7e-7).
- desdiv 7y agoAWS averages about one major outage per year[0]. Google's own status page[1] list near 100 incidents in the past 365 days, only one of which ended on HN frontpage. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Services#Amazon_Web_Services_Outages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Amazon_Web_Service... [1] https://status.cloud.google.com/summary https://status.cloud.google.com/summary
- emerongi 7y agoGood correction: the outages do happen at a fixed rate. Regarding GCP, I only see a couple events that have lasted more than 8 hours, not sure how many of those affect more than one subsystem.
- Buge 7y agoBoth of these Google outages made it to the HN frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20077421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20077421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20338263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20338263 Both of these AWS outages made it to the HN frontpage (and neither are listed in that AWS timeline): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20298719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20298719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19749781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19749781
- api 7y agoFacebook, Google, Apple, Cloudflare, Azure, Amazon, WhatsApp, and we have noticed smaller bits of routing weirdness like servers in Los Angeles not being able to hit GitHub for a few hours a few days ago. This is more like 6-8, not e. It's definitely odd. One non-conspiracy explanation I can imagine is that maybe all these big providers have a bunch of hidden dependencies on each other.
- 3JPLW 7y agoI agree, this is a bigger and really dense cluster, but remember that e is just the average (mean) cluster size. There will be clusters bigger than it. My point is simply that our intuition of randomness biases us to see meaning in clusters when there is none in the first place. In other words, we need to intentionally shift our prior on how unlikely this event is. Yes, it's still unlikely, but it's not as unlikely as you would think.
- inlined 7y agoApple documents their dependencies on other Cloud providers. Facebook has its own DCs but I think they’re sometimes colocated with cloud providers’.
- the-dude 7y agoBut the outages are sequential, not simultaneous
- api 7y agoThey are very dense compared to the usual rate.
- dmix 7y agoPlus one big outage story then makes other minor outages get more headlines... when normally no one cares. Same thing with hurricanes, when a bad one happens in the US they are more likely to document other minor hurricanes in the Caribbean and Latin America. But otherwise plenty of hurricanes hit those areas and it doesn't make major headlines.
- stefco_ 7y ago“When it rains, it pours” is the conventional wisdom distillation of Poisson variable behavior
- philshem 7y ago2.718 is the Euler number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(mathematical_constant) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(mathematical_constant)
- the-dude 7y agoDude, I wrote that top comment. And I was like iCloud WTF?
- ksec 7y agoOnce is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action. I don't even know if fourth of Fifth is confirmation.
- cantbecool 7y agoMaybe some submarines are cutting some deep sea cables? In actuality it's probably massive backbone upgrades that are classified, the NSA has to obtain real-time data from somewhere.
- snazz 7y agoWhy would the NSA be doing such low-level (literal wiretapping) work anymore? Useful traffic is almost always encrypted.
- 3JPLW 7y agoClearly this means they've broken public-key cryptography.
- z3t4 7y agoThey log who talk to who
- 2Ccltvcm 7y agoThey have a #ailored #ccess #perations department. Look it up.
- AlexCoventry 7y agoYou sure are playing it safe there.
- earenndil 7y agoFlaws could be discovered in modern communication such that they can decrypt it in 30 years time. How good is 30-year-old crypto today?
- JohnBooty 7y agoKnowing whom is communicating with whom is pretty useful to know, even if you can't decrypt the data.
- helloworldies 7y ago
- the-dude 7y agoActually there are not many actual conspiracies listed there. I will start : - All the companies in the list are getting rid of their Huawei dependencies, replacing routers by domestic ones. - China is flexing its muscles in the trade war : look, we are creating some instability in your e-commerce. Wait until we attack your infra ( electricity, water )
- wybiral 7y agoIf you go down the route of conspiracy theory you have to also believe that the companies who have already issued a PR response are lying and that all of the employees privy to the truth are also staying silent. That would be quite a story.
- the-dude 7y agoThe iPhone and the atomic bomb were kept secret quite well.
- wybiral 7y agoOne company keeping a specific product launch secret is different from three or four independent companies and all of their network engineers all conspiring.
- the-dude 7y agoSure, but the Manhattan project was a huge undertaking with multiple extremely large facilities. What if the NSA identified a critical backdoor and ordered all major companies to decommission and not talk about it? ( NSLs )
- wybiral 7y agoFair enough... But then they all just did a really crappy job of concealing the patch?
- ceejayoz 7y agoI wish there was a historical view. Very curious if this is common, or if it's unusual (which would make it especially unusual with the Slack, Facebook, etc. outages recently).
- tedmiston 7y agoThe page is on archive.org if you want to write a script to cobble together some historical data.
- rahuldottech 7y agoHoly crap this has been a turbulent couple weeks for internet companies and services, eh?
- samcday 7y agoI'd like to think the simplest explanation to this recent spate of outages is that all the engineers at each org spent too long reading the HN comment thread on the previous company's outage, and didn't notice their own servers catching fire ;)
- ohnope 7y agoAny internet engineers privy to what's going on the last few days, at a global infrastructure level?
- eastdakota 7y agoCoincidence.
- neom 7y agoWait... so you're not part of a massive global conspiracy? :(
- ok_coo 7y agoSenior people at the orgs are starting to go on summer vacation. ;)
- mzs 7y agoAnd summer interns are there.
- AndrewKemendo 7y agoThat honestly seems like the most likely answer.
- dylan604 7y agoWait, isn't it when the senior people leave that real work gets done?
- delfinom 7y agoNo, that's when managers and bosses leave.
- malloy 7y agosomeone deserve it :-)
- 7y ago
- thekyle 7y agoOne of the services listed is Screen Time. Maybe I'm mistaken but isn't that the feature on iPhones where you can see how much time you spend in each app? Why would that require Apple's servers.
- inlined 7y agoTime zones are ever changing. Maybe they’re looking up a database? Edit: actually screen time is the feature that measures how long you’re spending on each device each week. I’m not sure why that needs to talk to the cloud unless devs also get the inverse metrics.
- speg 7y agoIt syncs across devices, presumably that mechanism is unavailable during this outage?
- thanatos_dem 7y agoI believe it uses iCloud/CloudKit to sync data from all devices associated with your account.
- AlphaSite 7y agoCross device statistics.
- dmix 7y agoIt labels what you're doing during that time, ie, which apps you're using then displays an icon next to it which could explain the web requests since there are so many apps. My guess is that it's a glorified analytics system for Apple which they retooled into a useful service for end users.
- scarcelycoher 7y agoSo who is the tool now?
- snazz 7y agoAre there any graphs anywhere showing Internet traffic at different ISPs and networks? Such a graph (especially over a world map) would make it obvious if there was any DDoS, SSH bruteforcing, or other monkey business going on.
- kache_ 7y agoThese things are so much more painful to deal with when it's July 4th.
- Meekro 7y agoFor those out of the loop, this week has seen an outage from a bunch of major US internet companies: Cloudflare, Slack, Google Cloud, Azure, Facebook (including Instagram and WhatsApp), and now iCloud.
- aristophenes 7y agoAMD has been shipping their new Epyc Rome server CPUs to hyperscalars for a few weeks now [1]. It seems to be a very appealing chip that a lot of them are adopting. They won't be the same as whatever they were using before, so it could be that major updates are needed to include them, meaning that it's just a risky time right now? [1] Second question in https://www.anandtech.com/show/14568/an-interview-with-amds-forrest-norrod-naples-rome-milan-genoa https://www.anandtech.com/show/14568/an-interview-with-amds-...
- basch 7y agowhy is slack on that list, they use AWS. They arent an infrastructure provider.
- the-dude 7y agoNor is FB. It is about major outages.
- fc_barnes 7y agoI was noticing some issues with mega sync earlier, maybe these orgs are sharing infrastructure at some level... I guess I won't rage quit just yet
- pilif 7y agoAfter reading the ZIP bomb article also linked on HN, I have copied the largest file to my iCloud drive for fun. And an hour later, I'm reading that most of iCloud is down. I really hope this is a funny coincidence. And if not, then I'm terribly sorry.
- your_bully 7y agoDon't give yourself too much credit
- wybiral 7y agoHey, at least it's as likely as some of the weird conspiracy theories being floated around.
- walrus01 7y agoMaybe somebody copied the zip bomb onto the battery charge controller subsystem of the russian submarine cable tapping submarine.
- pilif 7y agoI was tongue in cheek. Of course I didn’t cause this. I imagine I must have been the millionst and one person to try this. It’s just a funny coincidence and I enjoyed toying with the thought
- dang 7y agoHey, could you please not create accounts to break the site guidelines with? We're trying for a bit better than this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mr_sturd 7y agoThink they tried to scan it for malware?
- jokoon 7y agoCan you try again to make sure?
- pcora 7y agoSo, when is Amazon / AWS outage day? Tomorrow?
- pawannitj 7y agoPrime day is coming :/
- mehrshad 7y agoIf there's any credibility behind the notion of these being deliberate in any way, I'd wager July 15/16.
- wybiral 7y agoWhy those specific days?
- tdurden 7y agoAmazon Prime Day(s)
- iamtheworstdev 7y agoAmazon prime day
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Buge 7y agoHow big of an outage do you want? Here's one from 7 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20298719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20298719
- dmitriid 7y agoTinfoil hat on, conspiracy mode on: And a fire on a Russian submarine whose purpose is said to be disrupting communications (it can access and cut underwater cables”.
- adventured 7y agoMight as well add the Vice President suddenly being required to stay in Washington DC early on July 2nd, to the list. Even if it involved the Russians attempting to tamper with underseas communications cables (and US service providers being forced to respond), we'll never get confirmation of it from either side. I don't know why you're being downvoted. The Russians trying to screw with US communications makes perfect sense as an explanation for such a comically implausible whoops one-after-another result like this. People here are saying that it wouldn't be possible for all the companies to conspire together to cover that up. Sure, tell me how it wasn't possible for numerous of the forced-to-join NSA programs to be covered up for years, all of which involved the participation of huge US service providers. Of course it's not only possible but very easy, major US service providers routinely work with US Government agencies.
- Raphmedia 7y agoIs it that much of an internet conspiracy theory when mainstream media reports on it? https://futurism.com/russian-sub-fire-internet-cables https://futurism.com/russian-sub-fire-internet-cables https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/02/russian_sub_disaster/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/02/russian_sub_disaste... https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-submarine-losharik-undersea-cables-media-speculation-2019-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-submarine-losharik-un... Etc. What I find interesting is that before big news networks covered it some HN users were linking to the story in the previous outage threads. Way before anyone knew that the submarine had cable cutting capabilities At the time, everyone downvoted them because of how unrelated it seemed. I'm not saying that I subscribe to the theory. But it is interesting nonetheless.
- ben509 7y agoWhether or not something is a conspiracy theory has nothing to do with the person or persons advocating it. And the mainstream press is really bad at careful logical analysis. If anything, their desire for sensationalism can easily outweigh their concerns over looking foolish. For example, back in the '80s there was the Satanic daycare abuse scare, and it was absolutely pushed by mainstream news outlets. (That's more of a moral panic than a conspiracy theory, but real conspiracy theories tend to be partisan and I'm trying to avoid that.)
- SpaceManNabs 7y agoImagine being on call this week. My best wishes to anyone doing DevOps or Ops.
- johnnycab 7y agoJust wondering out aloud rather than floating any theories, if it is in any way related to the 6.4 magnitude earthquake and/or geological events leading upto it. Also inter/un-related, Google provides Apple with the infrastructure for iCloud; they also experienced some downtime in the last few days, along with others i.e. tremors causing some sensitive/critical servers to misbehave. However, I doubt that it is down to these factors, as there will likely be significant amount of distributed fault tolerance, failover and contingency plans in place. https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ci38443183/executive https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ci38443183...
- jondwillis 7y agoThe outages occurred long before the earthquake but my mind originally wandered to the same place. What earthquake related causes could have had effects 24h or more ahead of time?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- luckydata 7y agoIt's definitely the end times. Locusts coming anytime now.
- controlweather 7y agoYou’re right, the crew got it’s seals and we’re releasing them. I am tech and weather and it’s not stopping. The opposite will always occur. The gates open soon.
- cameronbrown 7y agoApple runs their own bare-metal services - only some of which are hosted on Google Cloud. You could see which ones went down when Google did the other week.
- 7y ago
- kburman 7y agoIn India, I'm experiencing issues with online payment from last few days. Majorly with UPI payments. Not sure if these are related but hard to ignore it.
- DavideNL 7y agoLittle off-topic, but lately i often find myself Airdropping files between my iPad & Macbook because iCloud isn't syncing newly added files for some reason (which can't be forced/refreshed on the iPad as far as i know.)
- jwr 7y agoAnd I've been wondering why my kid could play games so long today, in spite of Screen Time limits :-) I guess that explains it.
- kemals 7y agoHere is how ThousandEyes viewed the impact: https://twitter.com/thousandeyes/status/1146862826566250499 https://twitter.com/thousandeyes/status/1146862826566250499
- sys_64738 7y agoWhat happened to 5 nines uptime?
- jaredcwhite 7y agoI'm actually relieved to hear there were a bunch of known problems…earlier today I was wondering why none of my notes and photos were syncing and thought iCloud was loosing its marbles. It used to happen a lot to me, but in the last year or so it's been pretty stable. I was afraid sync reliability was regressing! I suspect Apple's making upgrades as part of the push towards iOS 13 and macOS Catalina, and ran into some rollout glitches.
- 3xblah 7y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_day_(computing) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_day_(computing)
- mlosapio 7y agoiOS Walkie Talkie has been down since Wednesday