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Apple Services Experiencing Outage
- gnarlouse 10mo agoI don’t think I’ve every heard of an Apple Services outage until today.
- bombcar 10mo agoIf the outages only happen to services that aren’t used much I understand why.
- Etheryte 10mo agoApple is one of the largest service providers worldwide. Services are their second largest revenue stream after the iPhone.
- justapassenger 10mo ago1. About 25% of their service revenue is from charging commissions in app store and other 25% of the revenue is Google paying them for search default. Other services include things like insurance (applecare) That's not exactly same type services that most of the people would be thinking about. 2. A lot of their services have less criticality (and it's not a ding at them - it's often very explicit design choice). 3. App store having hiccups or iCloud backups being delayed it's not something that will usually gather enough attention of media.
- ctime 10mo agoYou might be amazed to know how critical Services are to functioning Apple devices. While they mostly can run offline, there are dozens and dozens of services that Apple runs that modern ecosystems require (like certificate related stuff). Other oddball things related to iCloud, APNS and the private services like iCloud relay are all extremely critical to billions of devices. Thankfully the all mostly fail open (captive portal is particularly tricky). Not saying they are as critical or visible as, say, Google.com going down, but none the less would have a very very large and visible problem if they all did go down suddenly. Thankfully, due to Apple design philosophy, most are totally decentralized and teams are given almost complete autonomy on how services are ran, which makes them a huge confusing mess but also, kind of a feature as Apple generally expects them all to fail in odd ways and the software can generally handle it.
- 1970-01-01 10mo agoEven downdetector.com has nothing about Apple Services being offline: https://downdetector.com/search/?q=apple https://downdetector.com/search/?q=apple
- arprocter 10mo agohttps://downdetector.com/status/app-store/ https://downdetector.com/status/app-store/
- 1970-01-01 10mo agoThey're in double-digit numbers for complaints. Must be a new record :)
- crims0n 10mo agoSame... to their credit, even during the major cloud outages I don't recall Apple services going down.
- dabbz 10mo agoIf I remember right they primarily use Google Cloud with a small mix of multi-cloud stuff for iCloud
- 8fingerlouie 10mo agodepends on where in the world you live. If you live in a region where they operate their own data centers, you will be running on Apple data centers. If not, you're running on a mix of Google Cloud and AWS (IIRC). They used to use Azure as well, but I think that's no longer the case. In any case, your data is encrypted (by Apple) before being uploaded to Google or AWS, and only Apple has that key. Whatever E2EE encryption you use will be applied on top of that.
- dabbz 10mo agoLast I checked they were phasing out their own DCs in favor of cloud-provided services. Though it's been a while since I have heard anything about it, so maybe those plans got canceled. It could have also been phasing out those DCs for only the specific services and not all services. My details on the whole thing are fuzzy at best.
- 8fingerlouie 10mo agoAs far as I know, everything iCloud and Apple Intelligence runs off of their own data centers if you happen to live "near" one, but you could still be using AWS and/or Google as well. I live near the Danish Apple data center, and pretty much all my iCloud traffic goes there, with a small fraction (<10%) going to Stockholm, which has both AWS and Google data centers, so I assume they're using both for geographical redundancy (erasure coding) It gets a bit more fuzzy once you start moving into Movies/Music/TV/Billing/whatever as well as their backend services for the store and monitoring.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- fsflover 10mo agomacOS unable to open any non-Apple application (twitter.com/lapcatsoftware) 2603 points by mattsolle on Nov 12, 2020 | 1292 comments > I am currently unable to work because macOS sends hashes of every opened executable to some server of theirs and [it's down] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959
- g947o 10mo agohttps://www.theverge.com/2024/5/16/24158595/imessage-down-outage-iphone-apple-text-messages https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/16/24158595/imessage-down-ou... https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/25/23041217/apple-app-store-music-down-outage-offline-lossless https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/25/23041217/apple-app-store-... But indeed it's rare.
- jonas21 10mo agoThey have a major outage every couple of years. These don't have as much impact as some other cloud outages because they only affect Apple products, i.e. they're not hosting services for other companies. - https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/03/apple-investigates-app-store-outage-on-ios-and-macos-devices.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/03/apple-investigates-app-store... - https://www.macrumors.com/2023/02/23/app-store-apple-music-apple-tv-outage/ https://www.macrumors.com/2023/02/23/app-store-apple-music-a... - https://www.the-sun.com/tech/4944089/apple-maps-down-icloud-outage/ https://www.the-sun.com/tech/4944089/apple-maps-down-icloud-... - https://www.macrumors.com/2019/05/08/itunes-and-app-stores-suffering-outage/ https://www.macrumors.com/2019/05/08/itunes-and-app-stores-s... - https://www.macrumors.com/2018/03/27/app-store-outage/ https://www.macrumors.com/2018/03/27/app-store-outage/ - https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/02/apple-reporting-outages-for-many-of-its-services.html https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/02/apple-reporting-outages-for-... - https://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/11/some-apple-services-suffering-outages.html https://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/11/some-apple-services-sufferin...
- rtkwe 10mo agoDo they offer many services for *OS apps or are they mostly independent and only service their own first party apps?
- cr125rider 10mo agoiCloud is the backend for basically any settings/file sync for normal apps.
- paxys 10mo agoBut it is mostly used for periodic backup/sync. So you aren't going to really notice unless it is a very long outage.
- ben_w 10mo agoTheoretically they offer quite a few; in practice, I think nowhere or almost nowhere I've ever worked has gone for those options (except my own self-published games), instead preferring a custom solution that can be shared with web and android.
- dijit 10mo agoTo be perfectly honest with you, I wanted to come here to say that their services (on a good day) aren't very reliable anyway. I routinely have email issues, file transfer issues (to icloud) and issues accessing their binary notarisation service. The only thing that works routinely well is Apple Pay, however I think that it's refreshing a key lazily in the background and does not actually need a network connection to work. Good design at least. So when I saw that they're having an outage, I thought. "All at once this time I guess". I'll be really open here and say that I applied for an SRE job there out of hatred because whoever is in charge of SRE/Infrastructure Operations at Apple is doing a terrible job (or has terrible circumstances).
- eek2121 10mo agoI've never had issues at all. I use their consumer offerings (iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, etc.) and I've never personally witnessed an outage or problem. I regularly transfer stuff to iCloud from my PC running Linux, and I use the email service with a custom domain that used to live on Google until Google canceled the free tier of small business and also raised prices on the paid tier.
- dijit 10mo agoIt’s a bit hidden, for example if Apple Music isn’t working it will act as if my device is having an issue with the app playing; it doesn’t look like its a service problem because it hangs and freezes the UI for play- and pretty often I will force my mail to refresh and it will say the imap server is unreachable. Regardless, these kinds of things tend to be somewhat regional. I’m based in Sweden.
- amw-zero 10mo agothat's a fantastic point.
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoSeems both TV and Music are affected, I wonder if it's some storage service somewhere just totally degraded. I love CloudFlare for their total transparency reports about outages. I wish every other company would follow the same standard.
- thoughtpalette 10mo agoBeen using Apple Music all day today, streaming. Have yet to encounter an issue.
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoMust be a partial outage then? I was using Music earlier today as well. On my phone I download most of my music so I might never notice an outage though.
- thoughtpalette 10mo agoGood point! I might not have noticed.
- temp0826 10mo agoI had to try a few times to download from the app store this morning. Thought it was a dns/blocking issue on my part.
- andersco 10mo agoAlso seeing outages relating to App Store Connect, currently unable to submit builds to TestFlight.
- snarf21 10mo agoThe ASC website isn't loading correctly either.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- jordemort 10mo agoSorry, it's my fault, I migrated my playlists over to TIDAL earlier today
- rvz 10mo agoLooking forward to the post-mortem
- bitpush 10mo agoI'd be really surprised if Apple were forthcoming. Apple famously holds all cards close to the chest, so I dont expect anything from them. Happy to be wrong though.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- apparent 10mo agoDid this affect notifications/app updates? I found that podcasts from my third-party app were not showing up for me when they normally do. I would assume that when I manually refresh the list, that wouldn't rely on Apple servers, but given this outage maybe there's a linkage?
- sneak 10mo agoApple services are realtime keys to: - activation: wiping an iOS/iPadOS/visionOS device, or reinstalling a mac after a full disk wipe - apns: push notifications, used for realtime notifications for all apps on iOS/iPadOS, even things like Signal that do not use Apple's messaging infrastructure - imessage: enough said - boot ticket signing: required for any mac to do an OS update (it's serialized to the CPU's ECID) any one of these going down for any significant period of time is going to cause widespread global economic disruption.
- drnick1 10mo agoAnd this is precisely why you need decentralized systems. It's absurd that text messages are routed through Apple's servers, or that you need Apple's permission to wipe a device.
- FridgeSeal 10mo ago> It's absurd that text messages are routed through Apple's servers Well, that’s because…they’re not text messages.
- gjsman-1000 10mo agoIf they were text messages, it's absurd that text messages are often routed through two servers even!
- sosodev 10mo agoAren't all text messages routed through a server? I guess it's more decentralized when it comes to telecom though.
- NetMageSCW 10mo agoI don’t think it’s any more decentralized than Apple if you are talking about MMS (instead of SMS). Your carrier still provides the MMS servers.
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- seper8 10mo agoNoticed this too earlier today. App Store apps not downloading.
- niwtsol 10mo agoThis outage was affecting developer.apple.com and pushing iOS app versions to test flight/production. I thought I was going crazy, thanks for posting this.
- binsquare 10mo agoFailed to install/download newest xcode after updating Mac. Guess this explains it. Does Apple internally do something like COE's like Amazon?
- JSR_FDED 10mo agoEverything is working 100% for me
- impure 10mo agoI'm getting a lot of 500 errors when trying to upload my app to App Store Connect. Also the website is loading slowly.
- resonious 10mo agoI wonder about APNs and Apple Business Manager. I've heard from people seeing weird stuff happening on those products but I don't see it on the report here.
- joecool1029 10mo agoCurious to see the Testflight/Support apps updated just after. I’m betting they pushed an upgrade to something in their services and it was bumpy.