Monday, March 21, 2022

Widespread Apple Services Outage

MeanRaw:

And the CloudKit 503 is back :(

Apple really needs to get it together. So frustrating

Michael Billig:

Apple store systems are down and they’re literally doing everything on paper lol

Joe Rossignol:

Affected services and apps include the App Store, iCloud, Siri, iMessage, iTunes Store, Apple Maps, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness+, Apple TV+, Find My, FaceTime, Notes, Stocks, and many others, according to complaints across Twitter and other platforms. Apple’s developer website is also inaccessible due to server issues.

[…]

All of the issues have now been resolved, according to Apple’s System Status page.

This must have been really bad if it showed up on the System Status page. I saw some problems with the App Store and iMessage—but I always have problems with iMessage.

Previously:

Update (2022-03-23): NetNewsWire:

If NetNewsWire iCloud syncing isn’t working for you right now, it’s because there are outages happening right now.

Ilja A. Iwas:

Apple’s Notarization service for third party macOS apps seems to be down as well.

Maciej:

I wiped and did the clean reinstall of iOS on my iPhone today (unrelated; I had some other serious issue). I wasn’t aware of that outage at first and it made the whole process rather frustrating. I don’t know what’s worse, generic errors or silent fails.

Due:

I’ve been seeing more user reports of 503 in the 1-2 weeks leading up to the outage.

Curtis Herbert:

Looks like this isn’t an Apple-isolated issue? PayPal, AWS, etc also seeing spikes in issues.

Juli Clover:

Apple’s services and apps appear to be experiencing yet another outage, with complaints on Twitter about problems with Apple Maps, the App Store, Apple Music, Weather, Podcasts, the Apple online store, and more.

This is now resolved, too, at least according to System Status.

6 Comments RSS · Twitter

I didn't experience much trouble, but a fascinating problem I had is on iPhone my weather app's home-screen widgets complained they couldn't figure out my location, even though upon opening the app (Weather Line in this case) the app did know where I was. It seemed to happen and be resolved at the same time as all the other problems.

Just ut of curiosity, is it documented how the system status page is updated?Automatically or manually during office hours?

Because it's quite strange that the system status page was saying that everything was OK when the App Store web page could not even load on macOS and it was not possible to download an app from the App Store on iOS.

Old Unix Geek

My provisioning certificates expired, and XCode produced the very useful error message: "A server with the specified hostname could not be found". Trying to debug it took me down all sorts of very unhelpful rabbit holes until I noticed that developer.apple.com wasn't being found on DNS. I wasted an hour.

Seriously, would it be so hard to say "XCode cannot resolve server (servername)'s IP address and thus cannot download a new provisioning certificate." ??? It's not as if XCode were made for those who get scared if they see a useful error message...

>Because it's quite strange that the system status page was saying that everything was OK when the App Store web page could not even load on macOS and it was not possible to download an app from the App Store on iOS.

Worse. It started saying that Maps Search was broken _after it was already fixed_.

So, if it's automated, it's updated with quite a delay (perhaps a CDN propagation issue). Or it's entirely manual.

Worst for me was CloudKit; lire uses it for subscription lists and settings and cache of downloaded articles. So, complete disablement of my RSS feed reader, even though the feeds were all working fine. Ugh. The cloud is wonderful, isn't it?

The funny thing is that I don't believe it's actually all that uncommon--this time it was just very obvious. I only knew something was really up when I restarted my iPhone and the problem didn't disappear, so I couldn't chalk it up to some ineptitude in a local cloud syncing process. Also because I looked in iCloud Settings and it wasn't correctly loading my device list.

The future is decentralised ...

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