Apple Offers No Explanation for 7-Hour Outage (nbcnews.com)

Apple services went offline for up to 7 hours Thursday -- and the company has yet to offer an explanation. An anonymous reader writes: The outage affected the App Store, iTunes in the Cloud, Apple TV, Mail Drop, Find my iPhone, and Photos. During the outage, Apple responded to complaints on Twitter, "Thank you for the information. We're aware of this issue and are investigating," Tech Times reports that the iCloud Music Library had also experienced an outage on Wednesday, and that just weeks ago Apple released an operating system update which bricked several iPad Pros. And yesterday Amazon also experienced a service outage.

Comments

this kind of thing is usually a DDoS

[YesIAmAScript]

When companies have outages like this and don't want to talk about it it's usually a DDoS.

They don't want to brag they can be DDoSed nor do they want to help pump up the group who did it. They don't want to give any info which is feedback about how well it worked either so the attackers can tune their attacks or gauge their chance of success if it was a dry run.

Re:this kind of thing is usually a DDoS

[yoshi_mon]

The main reason they don't want to talk about it is because they keep wanting every end user to believe that "the cloud" is some sort of mythical thing. That it will always be there to have their data and that they should pay their monthly subs to have that privilege.

Of course in reality we IT professionals know that "the cloud" is nothing new and not even remotely secure. Local data is always better than remote data and we have the tools to make that a very secure platform for end users. However that is just a one time cost and well...we can't have that now can we Win10?

Re:this kind of thing is usually a DDoS

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no cloud.

https://d21ii91i3y6o6h.cloudfront.net/gallery_images/from_proof/3442/large/1418280711/die-cut-stickers.png

Re: this kind of thing is usually a DDoS

[Rosyna]

While Apple isn't obligated to state while something was does, there are reasons other than a DDoS that seem more likely.

One is that various Apple services use both Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure for file storage. Given that not every Apple service was down for everyone, it's possible the Amazon outage was related to the Apple outage.

Secondly, numerous other services on the internets were down, including numerous .gov websites belonging to states (California.gov, Connecticut.gov), it's possible a regional Internet backbone was having issues.

Although the most likely reason remains Apple that was working on some backend changes for new features and/or services they'll be announcing at WWDC and something went wrong.

Re: this kind of thing is usually a DDoS

[Rosyna]

Err, "While Apple isn't obligated to state why something was down".

Sigh, I wish Slashdot supported preview mode on mobile.

Re:this kind of thing is usually a DDoS

[Hognoxious]

I reckon their server was installing Windows 10.

Re: Awful editing

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

How can the Apple TV be down anyway? It's a device, not a service. I didn't experience any problem watching Netflix with it.

maybe im paranoid

[LodCrappo]

apple, amazon, teamviewer and maybe more have had similarish seeming outages recently. one theory in the teamviewer incident was that attackers manipulated dns to gather credentials that the teamviewer client leaked when redirected. another is that the LinkedIn compromise combined with users using the same password on multiple sites lead to the teamviewer exploits and maybe some on Tumblr and myspace too.

spooky week for security things. if this is an organized thing and now apple accounts are targeted, about to get worse. but maybe its nothing, i honestly have no idea.

A dev is claiming responsibility

[drunkenoafoffofb3ta]

(He uploaded a series of >2Gb app updates at the same time). https://m.facebook.com/story.p...

Re:Apple, the only certification-lacking cloud...

[ledow]

I was once asked to gather EU data protection guarantees from various cloud companies. Basically, a new law came in that meant that we couldn't just take their word that they only stored and processed our data on EU datacentres, but an actual written guarantee. ISO 27001 was apart of that.

At the time, Apple were the only large cloud company completely unable / unwilling to supply one. I don't know if that's changed because, well... since then we've only ever supplied fake personal information and/or disabled iCloud on products that we use, and the decision was made that Google Apps would be the cloud services of choice because they complied and were free (for schools).

Hilarious that people point fingers at Google for privacy and data processing, and yet Apple was the one to fail hardest on this, for a period of many months, forcing our hand.

Re: Apple, the only certification-lacking cloud...

[ledow]

iPads.
Education.

Though I agree with your sentiment, someone should tell Apple that they aren't targeting education. And the rest of the world that also believes that (because they are TOLD that).

Re:Awful editing

[Anubis IV]

Amazon's downtime is almost certainly unrelated to Apple's outage.

As I recall (and I may be wrong), a lot of Apple's services are still built on top of AWS and Azure. They've been transitioning away from Amazon and Microsoft to their home-grown solutions, but a lot of their core services actually use their competitor's back-ends. As such, it's entirely probable that an outage at the one may be related to an outage at the other happening at the same time.

Re:Wait a minute, does it have to explain?

[geekmux]

Apple services went offline for up to 7 hours Thursday -- and the company has yet to offer an explanation...

Can someone tell us whether Apple's "contract" with its fans, or users of its services, contains any clause that requires it to explain incidents like the one described?

Does Customer Relationship Management mean anything anymore, or are consumers that much in denial about being nothing more than mindless lemmings, blindly accepting of anything from their service masters?

Re:Because Fuck You

[jazzis]

Yeah. Amazon servers have outage. Affected Appl servicese.

Re:Awful editing

[dgatwood]

Yes, and one problem with that approach is that too many of Apple's services are centralized unnecessarily. I mean, a sizable percentage of iOS users already have Time Capsule base stations that could easily support iOS backups, but Apple won't let us use them, instead forcing us to either use these cloud-based solutions or back up manually to our laptops and then back up those backups to our Time Capsules.

Taken one step further, Find My iPhone could just as easily do some sort of wide-area Bonjour registration with that Time Capsule even when you aren't at home. This would require some centralized service for some users, but the infrastructure would be much simpler for that case (basically DynDNS), and for folks with public static IPs (whether IPv4 or IPv6), the infrastructure requirements would be nonexistent.

Same goes for photo storage and iTunes in the Cloud, potentially, depending on how fast your home Internet connection is.

And there's no reason you can't use DropBox or other services if Mail Drop goes down.

So basically, out of this entire list of services, had the system allowed decentralization, the only service that would have had a widespread impact would have been the App Store.