Friday, May 12, 2023

Apple Service Outages

Ben Lovejoy:

The number of Apple service outages lately seems to have risen to the point where they’ve become almost routine.

[…]

Let’s look just at Apple service outages and issues in the four-and-a-bit months of the year to date – and these are just the examples found by a quick search of our own site, which only reports the more widespread problems[…]

[…]

I can’t count the number of times I see tweets about Apple service outages, confirm them on DownDetector, and then check Apple’s system status page to see nothing but green lights.

I regularly encounter outages with App Store Connect, notarization, and Siri. I wouldn’t say that things have been getting worse, though.

Previously:

Update (2023-05-19): Steve Troughton-Smith:

There seems to have been a huge uptick in Apple services outages over the past six months. Is AWS/Akamai no longer able to handle their scale? Has Apple tried to move things in-house and is finding out the hard way why that's so hard? Or has internet infrastructure in general just been under a huge amount of DDOS attacks lately?

All the above?

Previously:

Update (2023-05-24): Filipe Espósito:

If you’re having issues with Apple’s iMessage on Tuesday, it’s not just you. The platform is currently down or partially not working for some users. While in some cases users can send text messages but not media, others have been complaining that iMessage is not working at all.

Update (2023-06-23): Adam Overholtzer:

I’m continuing to get several emails a day about #Cloudkit sync failing in my app, and now the 1-star reviews are starting to appear. No errors in logs or CloudKit console.

Is anyone else seeing a rise in CloudKit failures?

Jaanus Kase:

I have very few users, but I do hear that occasionally there are “iCloud outages.” Maybe all of us using CloudKit should do some kind of community effort to set up some monitoring to understand the problem better, since Apple’s own seems to be insufficient?

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Perhaps related: iMessage has randomly sucked for at least the past 3 months. It's probably the Apple service I use the most.

A text only message might take 10 seconds to send - even though the ones I sent before and after were instant.

Pictures now take 2-3 seconds for each minimum, and sometimes up to 20 seconds. The actual size or contents of the picture do not correlate to the amount of time it takes to send.

This has been observed on a diverse array of devices and connectivity (AT&T Fiber, AT&T DSL, Verizon 5G).

It feels like my Apple ID has a flag enabled on it called "Arbitrarily Janky iMessages", because I can't think of any actual logical reason for it to behave this way.


I'm glad I'm not the only one experiencing this stuff. The amount of time it take the weather app on iOS to find my city and barf up today's weather is just shy of a minute. If I traveled this might make sense, but work and home are less than 15 kilometers apart and it's been months since I've gone outside of that small circle. Yet, open weather and it just hangs there with the name of my city in the city's native language (not the language I've set the phone to) and I wait. Then the weather pops up, the city goes back to being written in English.

iMessages is another one. Responses to my spouse take forever to send on wifi and cellular. I don't even bother with pictures anymore.


I had a *very* weird 'services' situation come up this past week. I purchased a refurb'ed machine on Sunday, and it was "ready for pickup" on Wednesday. Except it wasn't.

They had the machine, it had my name on it, it was definitely paid for...but they couldn't scan it to check it out and give it to me. They tried for an hour, then sent me home.

I checked in on Thursday and again on Friday, and they still couldn't complete the purchase. They offered to cancel the order and let me "purchase" the refurb machine directly, but there'd been so much weirdness about it that I just cancelled the order, went to Costco, and had a machine in 15 minutes.

It wasn't exactly the same specs (less memory, less disk), but I *had* it.

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