12 ms·

Apple iCloud account and sign in outage affecting some users for over 24 hours

161 points by reimertz 6y ago

tinus_hn 6y ago
Probably a very limited set of users or this would be all over the news already
gpmcadam 6y ago
Unable to activate a few Christmas presents the day after, assuming this is due to many new Apple devices being unwrapped and turned on all at once.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
redis_mlc 6y ago
Pretty common. Happens to most companies at some point. An application monitoring check for login needs to be added. Often it's a missing index on a very large user table, though today unmanaged microservices are often the culprit. Source: DBA.
grlass 6y ago
Am not an Apple user, was tasked with setting up a new Apple ID for a parent's iPad today. Took an hour, one of the most unpleasant computing experiences I've had in recent memory, and I deal with embedded Linux systems. 14 OTPs sent to their mobile number, frequently being dumped back to the login screen. Maybe this was the reason, but damn this has discouraged me from ever going into their walled garden.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >Took an hour, one of the most unpleasant computing experiences I've had in recent memory, and I deal with embedded Linux systems. I'm pretty sure you've had tons of opportunities to spend far more than "1 hour" diagnosing, fixing, and handling some hair pulling desktop/server/embedded Linux issues - even when there was no outtage involved. Did these equally discouraged you from ever going into desktop/server/embedded Linux?
  - NicoJuicy 6y ago
    Handling servers and embedded Linux is much different than setting up an iPad, which is a consumer device...
    - grlass 6y ago
      Indeed, purpose was illustrative hyperbole - I am used to frustration. Consumer devices come with less expectation of frustration, a justified expectation setting up Android devices, games consoles, Chromecast-type things, etc.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      Yes, but that's neither here, nor there. First, because we could also have server-class devices that are quite easy to setup (similarly to how consumer PCs where much harder to setup in the past and are much easier now). We just come to not expect it, but that doesn't make consumer vs server something that inherently justifies "more difficult to setup". Second, because the "spend 1 hour to add an account on an iPad (and during an outtage at that)" is far from the common behavior of the iPad, to be representative of some inherent issue with it. So, it's more like "I had a quite unlikely and unrepresentative experience with an iPad and it put me off from such devices, whereas I tolerate the same far more often from servers and desktop machines and don't think twice about it". Which, put that way, is much less potent than "that damned iPad and Apple's walled garden wasted 1 hour of my life, I'm never going back to those", isn't it?
      - grlass 6y ago
        If we're talking server class, then the average experience for me is a lot easier than what setting up that particular device was. From the perspective of an individual, whether or not your experience is representative of most people's experience of a similar thing only has moderate relevance. Most people find serial killers to be normal, or even charming. This is of little comfort to victims.
      - AsyncAwait 6y ago
        > So, it's more like "I had a quite unlikely and unrepresentative experience with an iPad and it put me off from such devices, whereas I tolerate the same far more often from servers and desktop machines and don't think twice about it". Sounds just like "I am a Mac user installing Linux on a cheap best buy laptop and whoa it doesn't work as well supporting a pretty obscure config that macOS would never even boot on, but am going to compare to my top of the line MBP and complain".
- dx87 6y ago
  It wasn't because of the outage, I had the same experience setting up an AppleTV a couple of months ago. It seems like the whole "it just works" motto only applies if you use nothing but Apple products. It actually made my wife decide to not buy another macbook because of how transparently user-hostile the setup was.
  - some1else 6y ago
    Occiasionally it feels as if hurdles are placed specifically to make Google and Apple integration a pain. They're waging war and consumers are paying the price. We should hold them accountable, but the decreasing expectation of interoperability will make that harder and harder to do. The antitrust proceedings could help improve this situation, but consumer-protection organizations will have to fight to prevent the outcome leading to an even more hermetic oligarchy.
  - matwood 6y ago
    Not doubting your experience, because from what I've read when Apple fails it often really fails. I also think people rightly expect a perfect experience from Apple. It's the bar they themselves have set. With that said, what part of the failure mode was user-hostile? I have an ATV, various Chromecasts, and Amazon streaming devices, and the ATV is by far the best, most reliable experience. My only complaint is the price, and if they were cheaper they would be on every TV in my house.
    - Terretta 6y ago
      ATV is not even a “walled garden”, app runs on lots of things, even Xbox, for instance. Funny enough, I can’t get my dad to run the Apple TV app on his Xbox. He switches inputs, he can’t wrap his head around Apple TV being on or in the Xbox!
      - ogre_codes 6y ago
        You are talking about the app, they are talking about the hockypuck sized Apple TV device. These are not the same thing.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  Wait until you lose the secondary 2FA device. Then apple just locks you out because Apple owners apparently don't get robbed or lose their phones.
  - mr_toad 6y ago
    Losing a factor is a potential problem in any 2FA scheme.
    - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
      Apple though directly contacts another one of your devices, regardless if you still own it. If you don't own it...well, good luck contacting support getting it unlocked. It's gonna be a fun week or two proving you're who you are to apple. Also no, with Authy, as long as I have my master password somewhere, I can still login and get my 2FA codes.
      - matwood 6y ago
        > Apple though directly contacts another one of your devices, regardless if you still own it. Just so I'm clear, you're saying Apple sends a 2FA request to devices that are no longer tied to your AppleID? That seems like a huge security hole, and one I'm sure they would like to have reported. > Also no, with Authy, as long as I have my master password somewhere, I can still login and get my 2FA codes. Keep in mind that while Authy is great, it does weaken 2FA a bit. Now a hacker can hack Authy and then gain access. In a maximum secure 2FA setup (with a hardware token or Google Authenticator that is tied to the device), if you lose the second factor it's supposed to be hard to get access. Some companies even tell you up front, that if you don't have the codes shown when setting up 2FA, and you lose the 2FA you lose your account.
- Terretta 6y ago
  Since that’s not how any of that should work, perhaps either it was ID trouble related (ID troubles hit Azure/O365, AWS, and Google in Dec, Apple’s got company here), or there’s something odd in the setup you’re shooting for? In the small, iOS devices are one of the few things I can set up fresh for technophobes out of the box and over the phone. In the large, while bringing Apple ecosystem BYOD into a 15K employee bank, we got to see a good amount of setup challenges with various lines of phones, laptops, and desktops (main competing products were Surface, Microsoft’s first party line), and these are the ones that cost us the least to support. The flip side of your experience are my wife and my phones which seamlessly and with zero telco/carrier interaction, upgraded both phones to new hardware (11 to 12) while bringing over both dual SIM card and eSIM plans. First time I’d seen the “We found an applicable cellular plan that could work on this phone, want to bring it over?” (paraphrased) dialog box. There’s just no way clicking OK on that is going to make Verizon, T-Mobile, or AT&T do the right thing — but it does, in seconds. Both also used the new device-to-device content transfer rather than iCloud restore from backup, with devices usable again in under 45 minutes from start, complete with watches and headphones etc repaired to the new devices. Maybe I’m jaded, but damn this encourages me to evangelize their well-curated garden.
- smarx007 6y ago
  Do you have a VPN on the router level? Or a PiHole banning Apple servers? Or have you used Linux to try to log into the new Apple ID? Or disabled location services not only for apps but also for system services? I think Apple uses all of those as a sign of "suspicious" activity. Whoa, a pro user, that's suspicious! Jokes aside, I do all of those and had some problems with Apple ID (not as bad as you described) that went away when I temporarily disconnected the VPN, DNS set to 9.9.9.9 and Apple services where whitelisted in Lulu firewall for macOS. But also possible it was connected to the outage and some caches kept being evicted. Side note: To me it seems a lot of people rushed to activate their new Apple devices on the Christmas day. I was expecting the pandemic to have people to cut down on purchases that were not strictly necessary. What did I miss?
- toyg 6y ago
  I had a similarly bad experience today. I just wanted to share my iTunes library with my daughter. I have an MBP and she has an iPhone, should be easy right? Nope - since we don't pay the monthly feudal tax for Music, I had to fish out an obscure "sign in" in Settings -> Music, literally the last option on screen. Why do I have to sign in with my Apple ID on her phone, despite her account being defined in my Family already, just to share a few files? The only logical answer is "because you really should pay the monthly submission fee to Lord Apple". And of course I expect this will stop working as soon as she steps out of the house. Honestly, it didn't use to be like this. Hey Tim, you should at least pretend you're caring about something more than your profit margins.
  - unphased 6y ago
    Many things such as app purchases can be shared, but apple music family plan does cost more than the individual plan. The workaround is to add (as you did) both devices to the same icloud account. AFAIK (i am not an expert on this)
  - jagged-chisel 6y ago
    iTunes used to support "iTunes Library Sharing" such taht you were more or less streaming your tunes from your library to the receiving device - anyone on the same wifi network could share libraries. Now Apple Music is terribly confused about owned music versus streamable music. I haven't tried the owned library sharing in years, but I have problems trying to get tracks I own into audio processing apps - they should just be available, but it seems I have to download the track in Music first, then wait some unspecified amount of time before the audio is allowed to see it. The whole things counters the convenience I thought Apple was selling.
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  Also not an apple user but I wanted to try to build a react native app on a family member"s computer. I set up my own account with apples developer portal, trying to build and submit the app through my family member's computer was not as hard as trying to figure out how to sign out my family member's icloud account and log my icloud account in. Why is it so so so hard to switch user accounts on a macbook for 30 minutes and then switch it back?
reimertz 6y ago
I migrated over to Big Sur yesterday and rely on iCloud Drive for storing all my dotfiles / initial setup scripts, using symlinking between home directory and iCloud. So a consequence of my solution is that I am stuck now, waiting to be able to sync. This has happened before and I promised myself to migrate from iCloud if it occurred again so I guess this will be one of my New Year’s promise. On a side-note; due to the ability to add .nosync to a folder / file, resulting in content being ignored by iCloud, you can have a pretty decent folder structure. For example; - Work - A Company name - invoices - illustrations - documents - repos.nosync (everything in here is ignored) The problem is if you accidentally git clone into a directory that is synced, iCloud basically blows up rendering both the computer you work at unusable since it won’t sync properly, but also other devices since it’s trying to sync node_modules containing 500 000 files. Would have loved if iCloud Drive supported block lists - would have solved so many issues.
- Wonnk13 6y ago
  The lack of encryption has put some pressure on myself to delete all my icloud backups and not rely on it anymore, but holy hell it never even occurred to me what havoc would happen if you put a coding project in a directory that's monitored by iCloud!!
mistrial9 6y ago
Apple put a security check on my unchanged, 20 year email account last week. After contacting a chat helper and changing the password, it was resolved. The rep said "you are what makes Apple, Apple!" Overnight (five days ago), without any activity on my side, an ominous security lock appeared on that email account, and much effort was made with a contact at Apple who required my phone number with a call-back, and almost did not clear up the condition. I do not own a "smart" phone here in California! It was obvious that they are connecting phone numbers with data profiles, which I have assiduously avoided for a decade. Why was the first contact not sufficient, and why add insult to injury with smarmy customer praise, only to then do exactly the opposite of what was said? yuck edit- I am furious about the whole thing. I did nothing to start this, and use the email for super-ordinary things. It seems obvious that some tipping point has been reached within Apple Inc., such that two-factor authentication with or without consent, is now more important than customer satisfaction and good-will.
- traceroute66 6y ago
  >> two-factor authentication with or without consent, is now more important than customer satisfaction and good-will. I'm sorry, but what sort of pointless stupid rant is this ? Its 2020, surely as a contributor here on ycombinator, you must be tech-savvy enough to know how much of an increasingly GOOD THING(TM) two-factor authentication is in this era of key-loggers, phishing etc. etc. ? No doubt you would be the first person to start shouting from your rooftop with false claims about how bad Apple's security was when your account got hacked, carefully ignoring the fact you had not bothered to turn on 2FA.
  - throw97543 6y ago
    Two-factor is fine as long as SMS isn’t the only way for the second factor. Not to mention, many times, SMS becomes the only factor.
  - ryukafalz 6y ago
    2FA is great, but the only options Apple provides for 2FA are SMS/call and a proprietary 2FA that only works if you have an iDevice. If you don't own one and you don't want to give Apple your phone number, tough luck. Neither TOTP nor FIDO2 is an option, as they would be for most other accounts.
mike-cardwell 6y ago
Upgraded my partners iPhone for Christmas. We went through the process for automatically copying everything over from the old iPhone to the new one. First thing it told us was to bring the two devices near each other and ensure bluetooth was on. Did so. Nothing happened. Rebooted the old phone, and for some reason it then worked. Secondly it told us to sit there and wait for everything to copy across in 5-10 minutes. Supplied no visual feedback of progress and eventually after about 25/30 minutes it just failed. Second attempt succeeded, but as before, no visual feedback of progress, which was annoying. Not good enough, for the price of these devices.
- Terretta 6y ago
  The lack of transparency around this transfer process is weird. It’s also aggravating that the device to device transfer acts like an iCloud Backup and doesn’t bring over files tagged to not cloud backup. As far as I know, the only way to get a mirror of your original device that includes these configuration or data files from things like 2FA or wallets is still lighting cabled encrypted backup / restore.
  - crocbuzz 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure the initial restore from iCloud when setting up a brand new device gives you the option to pull down everything or transfer stuff stored on the other device locally if you still have the old device nearby. If you restore from an iCloud backup later, you can't get other stuff, just the stuff in iCloud.
  - lights0123 6y ago
    > data files from things like 2FA or wallets do you have example apps? Authy and Mozilla Lockwise (iOS integration with Firefox password store) both copied over to my new device seemlessly: I only needed to give an "OK" to allow them to use Face ID to unlock and that was it. I didn't have to sign in or do any authentication other than biometric.
- realusername 6y ago
  > Supplied no visual feedback of progress That's kind of a trademark of Apple, they absolutely hate showing progress and detailed information about what's going on (maybe for design reasons? Who knows). When it does not work, there's generally no way to know what's happening and why.
fnord77 6y ago
that one developer made some big commits on frida and pushed them to prod. then went on vacation
- derwiki 6y ago
  They might learn their lesson
- katbyte 6y ago
  Microsoft is making an azure wide change to how key vaults behave at midnight on the 31st which seems equally as silly
misnome 6y ago
Got partner a new 16” MacBook Pro, which came with Catalina installed. Tried to update and it spent five hours downloading Big Sur then said “the installer.pkg has failed gatekeeper verification” and deleted the installer. Tried again, says “1 day” estimated download time. Left overnight and this morning it has a gibberish error. This is a brand new out-of-box machine. Half her games no longer work as 32 bit, and constant crashes from video card driver in games that do. I mean, I like the ecosystem, at least with my Mac still on High Sierra, but have no idea how anyone actually using as a non-technical consumer side manages to deal with stuff like this. It reminds me of obscure setting fiddling in early windows.
- barkingcat 6y ago
  Ha this is par for course for the Mac ecosystem. And if you say that it doesn't work, the response will be gaslighting: for example: you're holding it wrong, you're using it wrong, you're installing it wrong, you're not supposed to play games, old software are no longer runnable for your own good, etc
  - tracer4201 6y ago
    I’m not sure if these issues are widespread. I use a MacBook for work and have a personal one at home. Updates generally just work — I was promoted to install Big Sur. I made sure the charger was plugged in, and then I left it running for a bit while I was doing other stuff around my home. I’m not saying issues don’t exist. Maybe I’m lucky? I wonder what percentage of machines are actually impacted.
    - matwood 6y ago
      I don't think you're lucky. We hear about (and people complain about) these issues because they are the exception. Apple has done a good job to the point where everyone thinks Apple products should just work. And, for the most part they do. I think Apple's problem here is that when they don't just work, Apple has not optimized for that experience. And that lack of optimization is mostly around communication. Lack of communication has bit Apple other times. In the battery slow down case for example. Slowing the phone down was the right move, but not communicating what was happening was the issue.
that_guy_iain 6y ago
What we have in this thread is a bunch of IT professionals that will be understanding or demand understanding from others when their systems fail at peak times but when someone else's systems fail under peak they're very damning of the others.
- post_break 6y ago
  Eh, we have one of the biggest days for one of the biggest companies whos principle is it just works, and they have the biggest fail of an outage on their super bowl. I think the criticism is valid.
- toyg 6y ago
  What we have in this thread is also a bunch of apologists for what is literally the richest company on the planet, with untold riches stored in tax havens.
  - zepto 6y ago
    It seems like you think that technical problems are solved automatically by money. As far as I know, every major cloud service provider has had a major outage at one point or another. Could it be that 100% uptime isn’t simply solved by paying for it?
- meekrohprocess 6y ago
  Load testing for cyclical holiday traffic spikes is not a new or difficult concept. Most retail companies do it annually around September-October, IME. But the cause of the outage is still speculation. I hope that something else caused it, because Apple's customers are right to expect Apple to undergo that kind of baseline preparation.
- tmotwu 6y ago
  Do you make this comment whenever AWS, GCP, Azure, or Facebook gets downtime?
  - that_guy_iain 6y ago
gdeglin 6y ago
Thanks for sharing this! I ran I to this while setting up a new MacBook for my in laws. The symptom was that it would say that their iCloud security code was wrong. Terrible experience. It nearly resulted in us resetting the account, which would have wiped all of their encrypted files. Migration assistant would also silently hang. Wish I had thought of checking this status page.
- afandian 6y ago
  I've had a similar experience a year or so ago when trying to resurrect an old apple account so I could listen to the DRMmed music I "bought" when I was young and stupid. I got inconsistent, confusing error messages when trying to sign in and authorize playback. None gave the correct answer, which was that I was trying to use the incorrect account for that track. There are some parts of the Apple ecosystem which are so obviously unloved and completely un-QC'd. Same with the app store, it's like no employee has actually tried using it.
daniel957 6y ago
This happened to me. On my phone and on my MacBook, I kept being asked to sign in. I was confused because I didn’t do anything that would require me to sign in again. I assumed that it was some security thing since I had been signed in on both devices for many months. After a while, I decided to sign in on my MacBook and then that changed some setting with iMessage messages syncing between devices.
cthaeh 6y ago
Once when I was setting up my mom's iPhone I couldn't get the app store working because whenever I tried to download something the app store went white. Trial and error told me that some apple id page was supposed to come up, but wasn't. Just a blank screen. Tried a couple hours later, it was fine. Meaning their server went down and they didn't even bother to code up an error page. Super lazy.
brundolf 6y ago
I say this as an Apple fan who uses almost exclusively their devices: iCloud is hot garbage. It mostly works if you stick to the default settings and use it for nothing but passive device-backup and photo-backup for a single iPhone. Anything outside of that is a mine-field of login errors, sync issues, totally unconsidered use-cases, functionality that's simply broken (not just under special conditions; flatly broken), etc.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  General purpose automated storage solutions are in general hot garbage. There is so much context around what to store and what not to store, how long to store it, and how important information is for a user willing to expend and prioritize resources that it's highly variable and subjective on a per person basis. "Cloud" storage services have taken the "save everything, worry about it later" approach since context is an issue and people are paying for this lack of data storage understanding with service agreements for never ending storage demands. It's one thing to setup backend infrastructure and manage the storage transparently to the user for your application needs--you're the developer, you understand the context of what is and isn't important in the frame of the application. Here's a case of even that shooting developers in the foot.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    I've never had a problem with Dropbox. In fact I'm extra glad to have it with my iPhone, because it backs up my photos in a way that I actually have confidence in. Unfortunately it can only do so while the app is open, because iOS doesn't expose a third-party API for doing photo backups in the background.
    - tokamak-teapot 6y ago
      If you give it Location access it wakes up as you move around and does a little backing up until the OS puts it back to sleep. I hardly ever open the Dropbox app manually but I see my photos from my phone appearing in Dropbox when I check on other devices. Slightly delayed (a day maybe) but that’s fine. It’s just for backup. You can check that Dropbox is trying to do this by looking for the ‘Improve Background Uploading’ setting in the app’s settings page, and enable Location access in the OS settings for the app, if that makes sense!
tl 6y ago
Unsure if related, but I cannot open my pending ticket with them. Direct link redirects to the main page with the message: "Apple support options are currently limited. Thank you for your patience and understanding."
sircastor 6y ago
I ran into this trying to setup my new phone yesterday. It was annoying, and frustrating compared to the rest of the experience. For instance, I was shocked (and delighted) that I didn’t need to move my SIM card over. But the sign in just failed, silently. It was especially annoying because my password is long and complex, and until I got my password manager installed I had to type it by hand. I eventually gave up and went about my day. It worked later in the afternoon for me.
tzs 6y ago
Any chance this is related to that bombing in Nashville that took out some major communications services? Sometimes a big disruption in one area can cause problems with seemingly unrelated services far away, and Apple does have a major data center in the South (although I think the only thing they have in Nashville is an office and I don't know what they do there).
- ShakataGaNai 6y ago
  Extremely Unlikely. Datacenters typically have multiple redundant and diverse paths for connectivity. Meaning they'll have all the bandwidth they need over 2 or more carriers, leaving 2 or more directions of their datacenter. If one ISP was having issues, they'd simply "turn down" those connections for a time and fail elsewhere.
matsemann 6y ago
Ohh, we spent aaaages yesterday trying to set up my brother's old iPhone for my dad. All the OTPs failed, even though we wrote them correctly. His iCloud didn't want to log in and resetting the password (as we thought we had the wrong one) just left everything in limbo. Apple support were less than helpful.
ogre_codes 6y ago
This is rule #1 of any tech gift. Install all updates before Christmas morning. Initial setup on computers, game consoles, and phones is always time consuming and error prone. Add in the massive updating DDOS which we call Christmas and millions of kids are deprived of hours of gaming on Christmas Day when their parents buy them a console and fail to follow this simple rule. Apple screwed up here... but if you'd just followed rule #1 of tech gifting, you'd have been in the clear.
- xyst 6y ago
  So much for it "just works". I think Jobs would be appalled at what Apple has become.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    This isn't just Apple. And it was an issue while Jobs was around too. Or did you think iPods came pre-loaded with 500 songs? When you bought an iPhone 10 years ago when Jobs was around, did it come pre-activated? A poster in this thread is complaining about buying a Mac with an old version of MacOS and needing to upgrade it. Apple can't update software on a computer while it's sitting on the shelf at Best Buy. Or did Apple forget the magic "Update while in the box" technology which was around when Jobs was alive? Nobody in your family spend Christmas Day waiting for their Playstation to install its first update? Hell, a small fraction of electronics fails to boot up every year. Just verifying that the new toy you bought a loved one boots is a good idea before you have a disappointing holiday.
    - matwood 6y ago
      I agree. Though I wonder if Christmas is a bigger iOS activation day than iPhone release day each year? I haven't had a problem activating a new iPhone on release day in years.

161 points by reimertz 6y ago

Probably a very limited set of users or this would be all over the news already

Unable to activate a few Christmas presents the day after, assuming this is due to many new Apple devices being unwrapped and turned on all at once.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

redis_mlc 6y ago

Pretty common. Happens to most companies at some point. An application monitoring check for login needs to be added. Often it's a missing index on a very large user table, though today unmanaged microservices are often the culprit. Source: DBA.

grlass 6y ago

Am not an Apple user, was tasked with setting up a new Apple ID for a parent's iPad today. Took an hour, one of the most unpleasant computing experiences I've had in recent memory, and I deal with embedded Linux systems. 14 OTPs sent to their mobile number, frequently being dumped back to the login screen. Maybe this was the reason, but damn this has discouraged me from ever going into their walled garden.

coldtea 6y ago
>Took an hour, one of the most unpleasant computing experiences I've had in recent memory, and I deal with embedded Linux systems. I'm pretty sure you've had tons of opportunities to spend far more than "1 hour" diagnosing, fixing, and handling some hair pulling desktop/server/embedded Linux issues - even when there was no outtage involved. Did these equally discouraged you from ever going into desktop/server/embedded Linux?
- NicoJuicy 6y ago
  Handling servers and embedded Linux is much different than setting up an iPad, which is a consumer device...
  - grlass 6y ago
    Indeed, purpose was illustrative hyperbole - I am used to frustration. Consumer devices come with less expectation of frustration, a justified expectation setting up Android devices, games consoles, Chromecast-type things, etc.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    Yes, but that's neither here, nor there. First, because we could also have server-class devices that are quite easy to setup (similarly to how consumer PCs where much harder to setup in the past and are much easier now). We just come to not expect it, but that doesn't make consumer vs server something that inherently justifies "more difficult to setup". Second, because the "spend 1 hour to add an account on an iPad (and during an outtage at that)" is far from the common behavior of the iPad, to be representative of some inherent issue with it. So, it's more like "I had a quite unlikely and unrepresentative experience with an iPad and it put me off from such devices, whereas I tolerate the same far more often from servers and desktop machines and don't think twice about it". Which, put that way, is much less potent than "that damned iPad and Apple's walled garden wasted 1 hour of my life, I'm never going back to those", isn't it?
    - grlass 6y ago
      If we're talking server class, then the average experience for me is a lot easier than what setting up that particular device was. From the perspective of an individual, whether or not your experience is representative of most people's experience of a similar thing only has moderate relevance. Most people find serial killers to be normal, or even charming. This is of little comfort to victims.
    - AsyncAwait 6y ago
      > So, it's more like "I had a quite unlikely and unrepresentative experience with an iPad and it put me off from such devices, whereas I tolerate the same far more often from servers and desktop machines and don't think twice about it". Sounds just like "I am a Mac user installing Linux on a cheap best buy laptop and whoa it doesn't work as well supporting a pretty obscure config that macOS would never even boot on, but am going to compare to my top of the line MBP and complain".
dx87 6y ago
It wasn't because of the outage, I had the same experience setting up an AppleTV a couple of months ago. It seems like the whole "it just works" motto only applies if you use nothing but Apple products. It actually made my wife decide to not buy another macbook because of how transparently user-hostile the setup was.
- some1else 6y ago
  Occiasionally it feels as if hurdles are placed specifically to make Google and Apple integration a pain. They're waging war and consumers are paying the price. We should hold them accountable, but the decreasing expectation of interoperability will make that harder and harder to do. The antitrust proceedings could help improve this situation, but consumer-protection organizations will have to fight to prevent the outcome leading to an even more hermetic oligarchy.
- matwood 6y ago
  Not doubting your experience, because from what I've read when Apple fails it often really fails. I also think people rightly expect a perfect experience from Apple. It's the bar they themselves have set. With that said, what part of the failure mode was user-hostile? I have an ATV, various Chromecasts, and Amazon streaming devices, and the ATV is by far the best, most reliable experience. My only complaint is the price, and if they were cheaper they would be on every TV in my house.
  - Terretta 6y ago
    ATV is not even a “walled garden”, app runs on lots of things, even Xbox, for instance. Funny enough, I can’t get my dad to run the Apple TV app on his Xbox. He switches inputs, he can’t wrap his head around Apple TV being on or in the Xbox!
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      You are talking about the app, they are talking about the hockypuck sized Apple TV device. These are not the same thing.
MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
Wait until you lose the secondary 2FA device. Then apple just locks you out because Apple owners apparently don't get robbed or lose their phones.
- mr_toad 6y ago
  Losing a factor is a potential problem in any 2FA scheme.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
    Apple though directly contacts another one of your devices, regardless if you still own it. If you don't own it...well, good luck contacting support getting it unlocked. It's gonna be a fun week or two proving you're who you are to apple. Also no, with Authy, as long as I have my master password somewhere, I can still login and get my 2FA codes.
    - matwood 6y ago
      > Apple though directly contacts another one of your devices, regardless if you still own it. Just so I'm clear, you're saying Apple sends a 2FA request to devices that are no longer tied to your AppleID? That seems like a huge security hole, and one I'm sure they would like to have reported. > Also no, with Authy, as long as I have my master password somewhere, I can still login and get my 2FA codes. Keep in mind that while Authy is great, it does weaken 2FA a bit. Now a hacker can hack Authy and then gain access. In a maximum secure 2FA setup (with a hardware token or Google Authenticator that is tied to the device), if you lose the second factor it's supposed to be hard to get access. Some companies even tell you up front, that if you don't have the codes shown when setting up 2FA, and you lose the 2FA you lose your account.
Terretta 6y ago
Since that’s not how any of that should work, perhaps either it was ID trouble related (ID troubles hit Azure/O365, AWS, and Google in Dec, Apple’s got company here), or there’s something odd in the setup you’re shooting for? In the small, iOS devices are one of the few things I can set up fresh for technophobes out of the box and over the phone. In the large, while bringing Apple ecosystem BYOD into a 15K employee bank, we got to see a good amount of setup challenges with various lines of phones, laptops, and desktops (main competing products were Surface, Microsoft’s first party line), and these are the ones that cost us the least to support. The flip side of your experience are my wife and my phones which seamlessly and with zero telco/carrier interaction, upgraded both phones to new hardware (11 to 12) while bringing over both dual SIM card and eSIM plans. First time I’d seen the “We found an applicable cellular plan that could work on this phone, want to bring it over?” (paraphrased) dialog box. There’s just no way clicking OK on that is going to make Verizon, T-Mobile, or AT&T do the right thing — but it does, in seconds. Both also used the new device-to-device content transfer rather than iCloud restore from backup, with devices usable again in under 45 minutes from start, complete with watches and headphones etc repaired to the new devices. Maybe I’m jaded, but damn this encourages me to evangelize their well-curated garden.
smarx007 6y ago
Do you have a VPN on the router level? Or a PiHole banning Apple servers? Or have you used Linux to try to log into the new Apple ID? Or disabled location services not only for apps but also for system services? I think Apple uses all of those as a sign of "suspicious" activity. Whoa, a pro user, that's suspicious! Jokes aside, I do all of those and had some problems with Apple ID (not as bad as you described) that went away when I temporarily disconnected the VPN, DNS set to 9.9.9.9 and Apple services where whitelisted in Lulu firewall for macOS. But also possible it was connected to the outage and some caches kept being evicted. Side note: To me it seems a lot of people rushed to activate their new Apple devices on the Christmas day. I was expecting the pandemic to have people to cut down on purchases that were not strictly necessary. What did I miss?
toyg 6y ago
I had a similarly bad experience today. I just wanted to share my iTunes library with my daughter. I have an MBP and she has an iPhone, should be easy right? Nope - since we don't pay the monthly feudal tax for Music, I had to fish out an obscure "sign in" in Settings -> Music, literally the last option on screen. Why do I have to sign in with my Apple ID on her phone, despite her account being defined in my Family already, just to share a few files? The only logical answer is "because you really should pay the monthly submission fee to Lord Apple". And of course I expect this will stop working as soon as she steps out of the house. Honestly, it didn't use to be like this. Hey Tim, you should at least pretend you're caring about something more than your profit margins.
- unphased 6y ago
  Many things such as app purchases can be shared, but apple music family plan does cost more than the individual plan. The workaround is to add (as you did) both devices to the same icloud account. AFAIK (i am not an expert on this)
- jagged-chisel 6y ago
  iTunes used to support "iTunes Library Sharing" such taht you were more or less streaming your tunes from your library to the receiving device - anyone on the same wifi network could share libraries. Now Apple Music is terribly confused about owned music versus streamable music. I haven't tried the owned library sharing in years, but I have problems trying to get tracks I own into audio processing apps - they should just be available, but it seems I have to download the track in Music first, then wait some unspecified amount of time before the audio is allowed to see it. The whole things counters the convenience I thought Apple was selling.
notsureaboutpg 6y ago
Also not an apple user but I wanted to try to build a react native app on a family member"s computer. I set up my own account with apples developer portal, trying to build and submit the app through my family member's computer was not as hard as trying to figure out how to sign out my family member's icloud account and log my icloud account in. Why is it so so so hard to switch user accounts on a macbook for 30 minutes and then switch it back?

reimertz 6y ago

I migrated over to Big Sur yesterday and rely on iCloud Drive for storing all my dotfiles / initial setup scripts, using symlinking between home directory and iCloud. So a consequence of my solution is that I am stuck now, waiting to be able to sync. This has happened before and I promised myself to migrate from iCloud if it occurred again so I guess this will be one of my New Year’s promise. On a side-note; due to the ability to add .nosync to a folder / file, resulting in content being ignored by iCloud, you can have a pretty decent folder structure. For example; - Work - A Company name - invoices - illustrations - documents - repos.nosync (everything in here is ignored) The problem is if you accidentally git clone into a directory that is synced, iCloud basically blows up rendering both the computer you work at unusable since it won’t sync properly, but also other devices since it’s trying to sync node_modules containing 500 000 files. Would have loved if iCloud Drive supported block lists - would have solved so many issues.

Wonnk13 6y ago
The lack of encryption has put some pressure on myself to delete all my icloud backups and not rely on it anymore, but holy hell it never even occurred to me what havoc would happen if you put a coding project in a directory that's monitored by iCloud!!

mistrial9 6y ago

Apple put a security check on my unchanged, 20 year email account last week. After contacting a chat helper and changing the password, it was resolved. The rep said "you are what makes Apple, Apple!" Overnight (five days ago), without any activity on my side, an ominous security lock appeared on that email account, and much effort was made with a contact at Apple who required my phone number with a call-back, and almost did not clear up the condition. I do not own a "smart" phone here in California! It was obvious that they are connecting phone numbers with data profiles, which I have assiduously avoided for a decade. Why was the first contact not sufficient, and why add insult to injury with smarmy customer praise, only to then do exactly the opposite of what was said? yuck edit- I am furious about the whole thing. I did nothing to start this, and use the email for super-ordinary things. It seems obvious that some tipping point has been reached within Apple Inc., such that two-factor authentication with or without consent, is now more important than customer satisfaction and good-will.

traceroute66 6y ago
>> two-factor authentication with or without consent, is now more important than customer satisfaction and good-will. I'm sorry, but what sort of pointless stupid rant is this ? Its 2020, surely as a contributor here on ycombinator, you must be tech-savvy enough to know how much of an increasingly GOOD THING(TM) two-factor authentication is in this era of key-loggers, phishing etc. etc. ? No doubt you would be the first person to start shouting from your rooftop with false claims about how bad Apple's security was when your account got hacked, carefully ignoring the fact you had not bothered to turn on 2FA.
- throw97543 6y ago
  Two-factor is fine as long as SMS isn’t the only way for the second factor. Not to mention, many times, SMS becomes the only factor.
- ryukafalz 6y ago
  2FA is great, but the only options Apple provides for 2FA are SMS/call and a proprietary 2FA that only works if you have an iDevice. If you don't own one and you don't want to give Apple your phone number, tough luck. Neither TOTP nor FIDO2 is an option, as they would be for most other accounts.

mike-cardwell 6y ago

Upgraded my partners iPhone for Christmas. We went through the process for automatically copying everything over from the old iPhone to the new one. First thing it told us was to bring the two devices near each other and ensure bluetooth was on. Did so. Nothing happened. Rebooted the old phone, and for some reason it then worked. Secondly it told us to sit there and wait for everything to copy across in 5-10 minutes. Supplied no visual feedback of progress and eventually after about 25/30 minutes it just failed. Second attempt succeeded, but as before, no visual feedback of progress, which was annoying. Not good enough, for the price of these devices.

Terretta 6y ago
The lack of transparency around this transfer process is weird. It’s also aggravating that the device to device transfer acts like an iCloud Backup and doesn’t bring over files tagged to not cloud backup. As far as I know, the only way to get a mirror of your original device that includes these configuration or data files from things like 2FA or wallets is still lighting cabled encrypted backup / restore.
- crocbuzz 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure the initial restore from iCloud when setting up a brand new device gives you the option to pull down everything or transfer stuff stored on the other device locally if you still have the old device nearby. If you restore from an iCloud backup later, you can't get other stuff, just the stuff in iCloud.
- lights0123 6y ago
  > data files from things like 2FA or wallets do you have example apps? Authy and Mozilla Lockwise (iOS integration with Firefox password store) both copied over to my new device seemlessly: I only needed to give an "OK" to allow them to use Face ID to unlock and that was it. I didn't have to sign in or do any authentication other than biometric.
realusername 6y ago
> Supplied no visual feedback of progress That's kind of a trademark of Apple, they absolutely hate showing progress and detailed information about what's going on (maybe for design reasons? Who knows). When it does not work, there's generally no way to know what's happening and why.

fnord77 6y ago

that one developer made some big commits on frida and pushed them to prod. then went on vacation

derwiki 6y ago
They might learn their lesson
katbyte 6y ago
Microsoft is making an azure wide change to how key vaults behave at midnight on the 31st which seems equally as silly

misnome 6y ago

Got partner a new 16” MacBook Pro, which came with Catalina installed. Tried to update and it spent five hours downloading Big Sur then said “the installer.pkg has failed gatekeeper verification” and deleted the installer. Tried again, says “1 day” estimated download time. Left overnight and this morning it has a gibberish error. This is a brand new out-of-box machine. Half her games no longer work as 32 bit, and constant crashes from video card driver in games that do. I mean, I like the ecosystem, at least with my Mac still on High Sierra, but have no idea how anyone actually using as a non-technical consumer side manages to deal with stuff like this. It reminds me of obscure setting fiddling in early windows.

barkingcat 6y ago
Ha this is par for course for the Mac ecosystem. And if you say that it doesn't work, the response will be gaslighting: for example: you're holding it wrong, you're using it wrong, you're installing it wrong, you're not supposed to play games, old software are no longer runnable for your own good, etc
- tracer4201 6y ago
  I’m not sure if these issues are widespread. I use a MacBook for work and have a personal one at home. Updates generally just work — I was promoted to install Big Sur. I made sure the charger was plugged in, and then I left it running for a bit while I was doing other stuff around my home. I’m not saying issues don’t exist. Maybe I’m lucky? I wonder what percentage of machines are actually impacted.
  - matwood 6y ago
    I don't think you're lucky. We hear about (and people complain about) these issues because they are the exception. Apple has done a good job to the point where everyone thinks Apple products should just work. And, for the most part they do. I think Apple's problem here is that when they don't just work, Apple has not optimized for that experience. And that lack of optimization is mostly around communication. Lack of communication has bit Apple other times. In the battery slow down case for example. Slowing the phone down was the right move, but not communicating what was happening was the issue.

that_guy_iain 6y ago

What we have in this thread is a bunch of IT professionals that will be understanding or demand understanding from others when their systems fail at peak times but when someone else's systems fail under peak they're very damning of the others.

post_break 6y ago
Eh, we have one of the biggest days for one of the biggest companies whos principle is it just works, and they have the biggest fail of an outage on their super bowl. I think the criticism is valid.
toyg 6y ago
What we have in this thread is also a bunch of apologists for what is literally the richest company on the planet, with untold riches stored in tax havens.
- zepto 6y ago
  It seems like you think that technical problems are solved automatically by money. As far as I know, every major cloud service provider has had a major outage at one point or another. Could it be that 100% uptime isn’t simply solved by paying for it?
meekrohprocess 6y ago
Load testing for cyclical holiday traffic spikes is not a new or difficult concept. Most retail companies do it annually around September-October, IME. But the cause of the outage is still speculation. I hope that something else caused it, because Apple's customers are right to expect Apple to undergo that kind of baseline preparation.
tmotwu 6y ago
Do you make this comment whenever AWS, GCP, Azure, or Facebook gets downtime?
- that_guy_iain 6y ago

gdeglin 6y ago

Thanks for sharing this! I ran I to this while setting up a new MacBook for my in laws. The symptom was that it would say that their iCloud security code was wrong. Terrible experience. It nearly resulted in us resetting the account, which would have wiped all of their encrypted files. Migration assistant would also silently hang. Wish I had thought of checking this status page.

afandian 6y ago
I've had a similar experience a year or so ago when trying to resurrect an old apple account so I could listen to the DRMmed music I "bought" when I was young and stupid. I got inconsistent, confusing error messages when trying to sign in and authorize playback. None gave the correct answer, which was that I was trying to use the incorrect account for that track. There are some parts of the Apple ecosystem which are so obviously unloved and completely un-QC'd. Same with the app store, it's like no employee has actually tried using it.

daniel957 6y ago

This happened to me. On my phone and on my MacBook, I kept being asked to sign in. I was confused because I didn’t do anything that would require me to sign in again. I assumed that it was some security thing since I had been signed in on both devices for many months. After a while, I decided to sign in on my MacBook and then that changed some setting with iMessage messages syncing between devices.

cthaeh 6y ago

Once when I was setting up my mom's iPhone I couldn't get the app store working because whenever I tried to download something the app store went white. Trial and error told me that some apple id page was supposed to come up, but wasn't. Just a blank screen. Tried a couple hours later, it was fine. Meaning their server went down and they didn't even bother to code up an error page. Super lazy.

brundolf 6y ago

I say this as an Apple fan who uses almost exclusively their devices: iCloud is hot garbage. It mostly works if you stick to the default settings and use it for nothing but passive device-backup and photo-backup for a single iPhone. Anything outside of that is a mine-field of login errors, sync issues, totally unconsidered use-cases, functionality that's simply broken (not just under special conditions; flatly broken), etc.

Frost1x 6y ago
General purpose automated storage solutions are in general hot garbage. There is so much context around what to store and what not to store, how long to store it, and how important information is for a user willing to expend and prioritize resources that it's highly variable and subjective on a per person basis. "Cloud" storage services have taken the "save everything, worry about it later" approach since context is an issue and people are paying for this lack of data storage understanding with service agreements for never ending storage demands. It's one thing to setup backend infrastructure and manage the storage transparently to the user for your application needs--you're the developer, you understand the context of what is and isn't important in the frame of the application. Here's a case of even that shooting developers in the foot.
- brundolf 6y ago
  I've never had a problem with Dropbox. In fact I'm extra glad to have it with my iPhone, because it backs up my photos in a way that I actually have confidence in. Unfortunately it can only do so while the app is open, because iOS doesn't expose a third-party API for doing photo backups in the background.
  - tokamak-teapot 6y ago
    If you give it Location access it wakes up as you move around and does a little backing up until the OS puts it back to sleep. I hardly ever open the Dropbox app manually but I see my photos from my phone appearing in Dropbox when I check on other devices. Slightly delayed (a day maybe) but that’s fine. It’s just for backup. You can check that Dropbox is trying to do this by looking for the ‘Improve Background Uploading’ setting in the app’s settings page, and enable Location access in the OS settings for the app, if that makes sense!

tl 6y ago

Unsure if related, but I cannot open my pending ticket with them. Direct link redirects to the main page with the message: "Apple support options are currently limited. Thank you for your patience and understanding."

sircastor 6y ago

I ran into this trying to setup my new phone yesterday. It was annoying, and frustrating compared to the rest of the experience. For instance, I was shocked (and delighted) that I didn’t need to move my SIM card over. But the sign in just failed, silently. It was especially annoying because my password is long and complex, and until I got my password manager installed I had to type it by hand. I eventually gave up and went about my day. It worked later in the afternoon for me.

tzs 6y ago

Any chance this is related to that bombing in Nashville that took out some major communications services? Sometimes a big disruption in one area can cause problems with seemingly unrelated services far away, and Apple does have a major data center in the South (although I think the only thing they have in Nashville is an office and I don't know what they do there).

ShakataGaNai 6y ago
Extremely Unlikely. Datacenters typically have multiple redundant and diverse paths for connectivity. Meaning they'll have all the bandwidth they need over 2 or more carriers, leaving 2 or more directions of their datacenter. If one ISP was having issues, they'd simply "turn down" those connections for a time and fail elsewhere.

matsemann 6y ago

Ohh, we spent aaaages yesterday trying to set up my brother's old iPhone for my dad. All the OTPs failed, even though we wrote them correctly. His iCloud didn't want to log in and resetting the password (as we thought we had the wrong one) just left everything in limbo. Apple support were less than helpful.

ogre_codes 6y ago

This is rule #1 of any tech gift. Install all updates before Christmas morning. Initial setup on computers, game consoles, and phones is always time consuming and error prone. Add in the massive updating DDOS which we call Christmas and millions of kids are deprived of hours of gaming on Christmas Day when their parents buy them a console and fail to follow this simple rule. Apple screwed up here... but if you'd just followed rule #1 of tech gifting, you'd have been in the clear.

xyst 6y ago
So much for it "just works". I think Jobs would be appalled at what Apple has become.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  This isn't just Apple. And it was an issue while Jobs was around too. Or did you think iPods came pre-loaded with 500 songs? When you bought an iPhone 10 years ago when Jobs was around, did it come pre-activated? A poster in this thread is complaining about buying a Mac with an old version of MacOS and needing to upgrade it. Apple can't update software on a computer while it's sitting on the shelf at Best Buy. Or did Apple forget the magic "Update while in the box" technology which was around when Jobs was alive? Nobody in your family spend Christmas Day waiting for their Playstation to install its first update? Hell, a small fraction of electronics fails to boot up every year. Just verifying that the new toy you bought a loved one boots is a good idea before you have a disappointing holiday.
  - matwood 6y ago
    I agree. Though I wonder if Christmas is a bigger iOS activation day than iPhone release day each year? I haven't had a problem activating a new iPhone on release day in years.