Thursday, September 26, 2013

iCloud-hosted Data Inaccessible for Some Users

Dan Frakes:

Starting on or around September 18, some iCloud customers found that apps that use iCloud to sync data between devices could no longer do so—they either would no longer sync or appeared to have lost their data completely. The apps otherwise functioned normally, but simply didn’t show any saved information or could not update or sync existing info.

[…]

Apple’s System Status webpage has yet to indicate any iCloud issues.

It’s inevitable that any service will have some downtime. But this seems to have been going on for more than a week. Worse, the OS was not designed to handle this failure mode gracefully. We don’t even know what will happen when iCloud’s Documents & Data syncing comes back online:

Unfortunately, before discovering that the issue was being caused by a larger iCloud issue, some developers recommended standard app-troubleshooting procedures, including deleting apps and reinstalling them, and even asking users to create new data and attempt to sync with iCloud to “jump start” a sync. In theory, the original data is still in iCloud and will be restored to these apps once Apple fixes the issue, but there’s always a chance that new data created for troubleshooting reasons will overwrite what’s in iCloud, depending on how each app handles sync and that app’s sync status at the time the problem started.

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[...] Link. I don’t rely on iCloud for anything important. [...]


[…] download. In fact, the download page is currently directing me to check the system status, which of course shows all […]

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