[HN Gopher] Apple shut down my iCloud account for five days, no ...
___________________________________________________________________
Apple shut down my iCloud account for five days, no warning, no
explanation
Author : alexrustic
Score : 193 points
Date : 2021-06-07 15:18 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zdnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zdnet.com)
| londons_explore wrote:
| I've been in the other side of this...
|
| You build a new data backend for a service, you test it a million
| ways, and finally you migrate all the user's over.
|
| Except it goes wrong. 999,999,999 user accounts migrated. 1
| account failed.
|
| Leaving the old infrastructure up for that one user is costing
| millions of dollars a day, hurting performance reliability and
| failover and holding up hundreds of other engineers projects.
|
| Turns out the failure is because the user managed to create a
| filename with 67000 byte order marks in and nothing else, and it
| trips up some parser in the new system. They probably did it
| using a custom client or some kind of exploit checking tool. It's
| probably some security vulnerability researchers test account,
| but we can't be sure because we can't look into the account for
| privacy reasons.
|
| Yet fixing the bug for that 1 user account is going to take a
| while - a quick bodge solution breaks other user accounts, and
| the proper fix is part of Jane's project due next quarter.
|
| The decision is made. We're going to treat the needs of the many
| over the few. We're going to disable this one user account and
| move on. That user will have to re-upload their data, and this
| time they won't manage to upload a file with 67000 byte order
| marks in the filename.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| In that case, if your system leaves you with no way to contact
| that user and say "Hey, there's an issue with your account that
| is causing a problem that we need your help to solve, get back
| to us within 3 days or else we're going to need to reset your
| account", you've failed at customer service.
| nexuist wrote:
| From the perspective of the customer to Apple - this is the
| opposite of customer service. It's not my problem if you
| built some new system that doesn't work with my data; you let
| me do whatever I wanted and didn't warn me that this wouldn't
| fly at some far-off point in the distant future. I'm not
| paying for the privilege to do QA for you. If you're having
| problems migrating my data you should let me continue using
| my account until you've fixed it on your end - I shouldn't
| have to know or be interrupted by an internal business
| process.
| echelon wrote:
| Cool, but it doesn't look like this guy doing anything out of
| the ordinary.
|
| He has a right to complain about his horrible experience and
| the way Apple customer support treated him.
| ska wrote:
| > We're going to disable this one ...
|
| All pretty reasonable; The only thing wrong with your
| suggestion is it's missing the part where you contact that user
| and let them know what you are doing and why...
| himinlomax wrote:
| And that's ok -- as long as you tell that user that there is a
| problem and that you're working on it.
| rgj wrote:
| I thought you said you tested it?
| [deleted]
| defaultname wrote:
| The actual story states that something unique in the customer's
| storage was causing an error on Apple's side, yielding downtime.
|
| I'm not remotely blaming the customer, but what a nothing-burger
| this submission is: Apple didn't "shut down" his iCloud account,
| they met an edge in their implementation that they had to
| remediate. Obviously customer support should be better and convey
| more information, but I picture a bunch of engineers frantically
| trying to deal with something they didn't plan for (cue replies
| claiming that the perfect programmers of HN would never have such
| an edge, how is it possible, etc) and things getting lost in
| translation.
|
| I do find the story interesting in that he immediately filed a
| complaint with the BBB. That seems...risky. It's unfortunate that
| big corps can do this, but I wouldn't want to be perceived as a
| "problem" customer doing things like that when big Corps control
| your online existence.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > I wouldn't want to be perceived as a "problem" customer doing
| things like that when big Corps control your online existence.
|
| Being a PITA on social media tends to be the only way to reach
| someone authorized and competent to actually resolve issues.
|
| Sure, try to resolve it through normal support channels first,
| but if you're given the run-around, you _want_ to be a
| "problem customer". The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
| simion314 wrote:
| We had bugs at work, but I assure you we do not take days to
| fix critical issues like a customer can't login and use the
| stuff he is paying us for. We would never show you a TOS and
| say to you "sucker you clicked accept, please wait until
| someone has the time to fix this minor issue for us but
| important for you).
|
| In cases where an issue inconvenienced a customer I know we
| were compensating them with stuff(like upgrades or discounts).
| gigel82 wrote:
| So it's their fault because "the dress was too short, and
| they're asking for it", got it. I find the "Apple can do no
| evil" answers despicable.
|
| You would not accept to have a non-functional service for a
| couple of months from anyone else either if you'll be honest
| with it.
| defaultname wrote:
| Astonishing. And there it is.
| chc wrote:
| I think the point is that it doesn't sound like Apple did
| anything to this person. This person apparently ran into a
| bug and it took Apple's engineers a few days to get a fix
| out. I do agree, though, that I wouldn't suggest hosting
| critical files on a service with no SLA like iCloud.
| simion314 wrote:
| I see a few issues with Apple behavior
|
| 1 users had serious issue but it was handled like some low
| priority, it took a long time to fix too so either was a
| serious issue or it really was a low priority thing
|
| 2 rubbing the shitty TOS in the face of an upset customer
| is a terrible idea, I stopped giving money to companies
| that id that to me.
|
| 3 Apple did not apologize or offer to compensate for the
| time the user paid for a service that Apple did not
| delivered, this is typical Apple where only a judge can
| make them admit blame and do the right/legal thing.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| Restating what someone said in a way which is deliberately
| far more outrageous and then arguing with the restatement is
| dishonest.
|
| First off, the article _headline_ :
|
| > Apple shut down my iCloud account for five days
|
| You:
|
| > You would not accept to have a non-functional service for a
| couple of months from anyone else
|
| Is five days acceptable? Probably not, no. Is five days
| remotely the same as "a couple of months"? No, and you know
| it, so knock it off.
|
| And what people are pointing out is that even though "shut
| down my account" and "had a maintenance issue that made my
| account unavailable" obviously have the same effect -- you
| can't get to your account, and that's bad -- the two phrases
| carry _very different semantic meaning._ If I say "my
| Twitter account isn't working", what you take away from it is
| going to be very different than if I say "Twitter locked me
| out of my account". In this article's case, the headline says
| one thing and the article says another.
|
| Nobody is saying it's just fine if you can't get to your
| iCloud account for five days if Apple screws something up.
| Nobody is defending Apple's bad communication here.
| Historically, not even the most enthusiastic Mac fans have
| ever once said "You know what Apple is great at? Cloud
| services." What we're saying is _criticize them for the right
| thing._
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > > I'm not remotely blaming the customer, but what a nothing-
| burger this submission is: Apple didn't "shut down" his iCloud
| account, they met an edge in their implementation that they had
| to remediate.
|
| Apple acknowledged they were not providing this person with the
| product the person was paying for, yet (presumably), no refund
| was offered.
|
| > I do find the story interesting in that he immediately filed
| a complaint with the BBB. That seems...risky.
|
| Why do people think BBB matters? I've had customers at my
| businesses threaten to go to the BBB and it affects business
| not one bit.
| defaultname wrote:
| I guess. Though I've never seen HN so invested in someone
| getting a $1.65 refund. Maybe we can setup a GoFundMe or
| something.
|
| As to the BBB, personally I find it to be a worse-than-
| useless corrupt joke. But running to them, forcing Apple to
| respond, is the kind of thing that just doesn't have a lot of
| pull against large companies.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Why do people think BBB matters?
|
| It's a generational thing - BBB tends to be respected by
| people who reached maturity before the internet became big.
| There was no easy way to complain or vent about business back
| then, so the BBB actually had clout... With businesses that
| actually paid to be a member... So, still not that useful,
| even then.
| mikestew wrote:
| The BBB never mattered, even if my fellow olde pharts
| thought it mattered. Note the part where you state that
| "businesses...paid". What's that phrase folks on HN throw
| around _way_ too much about who pays, and who the _real_
| customer is? BBB was the /dev/null for customer complaints
| that the businesses paid to cause customers to think they
| had effective complaint channel.
|
| Source: oldster from back when folks naively thought a
| complaint to the BBB made any difference, and a former
| owner of a business that was a member of the BBB.
| shkkmo wrote:
| I think it is far from a "nothing-burger" but a strong warning
| not to depend on Apple for business critical cloud sevices
| because they don't care strongly about or take any
| responsibility for customer downtime.
|
| Issues happen, but it is the response that companies give you
| that tells you how much they value your business amd how much
| you should trust them with critical infrastructure.
| sbuk wrote:
| If you're using iCloud, _a consumer service_ , for business
| critical operations, you're doing business critical _very_
| wrong.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| What makes iCloud a _consumer_ service but iPhones not a
| _consumer_ product in the same way?
|
| Unless they are, in which case we should get out the
| megaphones and warn all businesses that those expensive
| phones they're buying can't be relied upon.
| [deleted]
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > The subtext is that Apple's iCloud is lacking in some very
| basic principles of operations discipline that pertain to
| customer experience.
|
| The subtext is if you are of little to no value to the opposing
| party, you always have the risk of getting screwed. You will
| experience this a lot if you try to deal with governments.
| coldtea wrote:
| Yeah, the same thing (or worse) could have happened with any
| big company (and many small ones for that matter).
|
| Google, PayPal, Facebook, do it routinely...
| fumblebee wrote:
| iCloud is a thorn in my side. When it comes to downloading my
| photos on demand, I've found it to be infuriatingly slow. (The
| high quality versions of photos are stored on iCloud, and only if
| I want to view, edit, or send one are they then downloaded).
|
| Meanwhile I can stream a 4k YouTube video just fine.
|
| Either sort it out, or give me more local storage space for a
| price that isn't exorbitant!
| brightball wrote:
| Everything you mention is why I just use Dropbox for
| everything, in addition to another local and offsite backup.
| cridenour wrote:
| I've had a horrific time with Dropbox and photos. Some photos
| not backing up, losing permissions to my own folders, etc.
| I've since just spun up a server and use icloudpd to sync the
| originals nightly, backed up to B2.
|
| Obviously not a scalable solution for many, but I finally
| feel good about having access to my photos.
| fumblebee wrote:
| > ... I finally feel good about having access to my photos.
|
| I only realised how much joy I get from being able to
| access my photos when I wasn't able to anymore. Back in
| ~2012, I lost several years worth when the hard-disk on my
| Acer laptop failed and I didn't keep any backups.
| Devastating. Backing up is something I learned the hard
| way.
| Angostura wrote:
| Turn off 'optimise photos' on your device and you wont have to
| download the hi-res versions
| fumblebee wrote:
| Unfortunately, the issue then is that I'll run out of local
| storage. Meaning the only option is to spend much more on an
| iPhone with more storage.
| tgragnato wrote:
| Are there iOS apps that replace Photos with your own remote
| storage?
| wdb wrote:
| Remembers me to make more backups. Time to do that tonight.
| lisper wrote:
| > What kind of mega-corporation renders your service unavailable
| and has nothing to say about it?
|
| The kind we have. This sort of thing happens _all the time_.
| Large companies -- especially large companies with monopolies --
| screwing (at least some of) their customers is very much the
| rule, not the exception. In fact, I 'd be surprised if there were
| even a single example of a large company that did not have
| customer service horror stories like this one.
|
| Apple is particularly bad about this because they almost never
| acknowledge problems of any kind. They just issue regular updates
| that, if you're lucky, fix more problems than they introduce.
| Most of the time most of the features work for most of the
| people. But if you're among the unlucky minority for which
| something doesn't work then you are well and truly screwed. This
| is the reason I never use iCloud.
|
| [UPDATE]
|
| This is the nub of the problem:
|
| > USE OF THE APPLE SOFTWARE AND ANY SERVICES PERFORMED BY OR
| ACCESSED THROUGH THE APPLE SOFTWARE IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK AND THAT
| THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO SATISFACTORY QUALITY, PERFORMANCE, ACCURACY
| AND EFFORT IS WITH YOU.
|
| This is in the EULA. Everyone who uses iCloud nominally agrees to
| this. But of course no one really takes it seriously. Everyone
| thinks, "Ha ha, Apple is including this meaningless legalese in
| order to cover their asses, but they're not _really_ going to be
| so unreliable that they 're actually going to have to fall back
| on this to protect them. They couldn't possibly stay in business
| if they screw their customers, so they won't.
|
| Except that they can, and, manifestly, they do. The reason they
| can is that there are no viable alternatives, with Apple and
| Google (and Microsoft before that) having driven them all from
| the marketplace. As long as they keep the disgruntled customer
| rate low enough that it doesn't make the evening news, what
| happens after that really doesn't matter to them at all. It's the
| opposite actually: the cost of fixing the marginal problems is
| more than the marginal revenue it would produce, so taking care
| of things like this is actually bad business.
|
| None of this will change until people push back en masse and
| refuse to buy products with terms like this in the EULA.
| hu3 wrote:
| > Something from engineering about if there are too many nested
| folders in a customer's iCloud Drive account.
|
| /node_modules strikes again :)
| ksec wrote:
| 1. I wouldn't say the problem is well known, but locked out of
| iCloud is a fairly frequent complain from customers. And of
| course he didn't find anything on the Apple Support Forum. Apple
| delete those threads.
|
| 2. There were security issues in some cases. But you can tell
| because Customer Rep would not be showing much empathy, they will
| tell you they have nothing / update.
|
| 3. Engineering on iCloud has been a bag of hurt since Day 1, that
| is nearly 10 years ago. ( Remember when Steve said why trust them
| when they brought us MobileMe? ) iCloud Backup corruption is
| _still_ a thing even though it is extremely rare. I still dont
| understand how the backup could be corrupted. On the assumption
| they have multiple copies stored on different hyperscaler. ( I
| think it is Azure and AWS, not sure if they are on GCP now )
|
| 4. TimeCapsule for iOS. For Pete Sake this needs to be a thing.
|
| 5. Things like Project McQueen [1] or iCloud team infighting [2].
| You could probably smell a thing or two if you were keeping an
| eye on turnover and hiring with Cloud infrastructure. Although
| that is often not a reliable indicator.
|
| 6. And in 2020, it seems Apple were _finally_ doing something.
| [3] At least on paper.
|
| 7. Time to Watch WWDC.
|
| [1] https://venturebeat.com/2016/03/17/apple-cloud-project-
| mcque...
|
| [2] https://appleinsider.com/articles/16/04/21/icloud-team-
| repor...
|
| [3] https://www.protocol.com/apple-hires-cloud-open-source-
| engin...
| smnrchrds wrote:
| > _4. TimeCapsule for iOS. For Pete Sake this needs to be a
| thing._
|
| It will never be, because iCloud is a cash cow.
| coldtea wrote:
| Full TimeCapsule might not exist, but local (e.g. to your
| Mac) iOS apps backups had been a thing since forever...
|
| Unless something changed, they still are.
| dwighttk wrote:
| I don't think it is incremental.
| Jcowell wrote:
| What do you mean incremental?
| rubatuga wrote:
| They definitely are incremental!
| LeSaucy wrote:
| This is exactly why I have syncthing setup to mirror my iCloud
| Drive folders to my NAS. In the best of times, iCloud is used to
| seamlessly sync between iDevices. If it fails, I still have a
| local backup, accessible from iDevices, albeit less convenient.
| FearlessNebula wrote:
| How do you set this up? I'd love to get a good backup workflow
| going for my iCloud.
| nucleardog wrote:
| Not the guy you asked, but for my stuff I've just been using
| icloud-pd and rclone.
|
| I'm really only worried about my photos. Basically all of the
| photos and videos of my kid only exist on my phone and on
| iCloud, and even if I trusted Apple to not shut down my
| account, I'm one account compromise or dummy mistake away
| from a "delete" being synced and removing that content from
| all my devices forever.
|
| I just have a script that runs nightly that runs icloud-pd to
| download all new photos and videos at full quality to the
| server in my basement. So that gets me a local copy totally
| disconnected from iCloud. From there, I have rclone encrypt
| and push up changes to Backblaze B2. Ends up costing me like
| $1.50/mo.
|
| If you do this, make sure you put some monitoring in place.
| The 2FA on my Apple account tends to expire every few months
| and I need to go reauthenticate it.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| I've gotten into data hoarding for the same reason. Google
| photos, youtube, icloud; storing your content on your own
| hardware is always best for critical features like
| predictability and access (I don't even want to imagine
| managing multiple TB through my consumer internet connection).
| Cloud is great for convenience and redundancy but I consider
| those secondary features to data preservation.
|
| Follow-up: any recommendations for a beginner NAS? I'd love
| something cheap and simple; a 2-4 drive system with plug and
| play functionality would be awesome. I can live without
| streaming 4k videos or top-of-the-line features like that,
| though streaming 1080p would be nice.
| mceachen wrote:
| > any recommendations for a beginner NAS?
|
| I did a bit of research and wrote it up here:
|
| https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-
| files/#...
| ______- wrote:
| I only use my Apple ID for getting apps from the app store. I
| have disabled all the 'cloud storage' features of iCloud for
| privacy reasons. iCloud isn't even encrypted[0]. It's a privacy
| nightmare.
|
| [0] https://www.idownloadblog.com/2020/01/21/reuter-fbi-apple-
| ic...
| vmception wrote:
| From the source Reuters article
|
| > However, a former Apple employee said it was possible the
| encryption project was dropped for other reasons, such as
| concern that more customers would find themselves locked out of
| their data more often.
|
| When I was reading all of this that was the impression I got,
| before it was mentioned.
|
| How would device upgrades even work if Apple didn't have the
| decryption key? Not saying it is impossible, but I'm not aware
| of how it would work. I guess the user could use their password
| as entropy to decrypt? That's kind of scary.
| deepsun wrote:
| They could store the decryption key separately (in a
| different network/vault) with audit trail. They could still
| be able to decrypt the docs, but it would be harder to break
| in. I believe google and amazon do that already.
| pgalvin wrote:
| That actually is what Apple (and pretty much all cloud
| storage) does. iCloud is built largely on Google's
| hardware, hence the encryption. Of course, this doesn't
| mean it is end-to-end encrypted as most people infer
| "encrypted" to mean, otherwise we could call Dropbox and
| Google Drive encrypted services.
| rubatuga wrote:
| Same here, I even wrote a series on moving away from iCloud and
| self-hosting all my services:
|
| https://www.naut.ca/blog/tag/shs/
| ipython wrote:
| I had a similar issue with my iCloud account. I wasn't locked
| out- but I had a "phantom" iOS device backup file that was taking
| up several GB worth of iCloud Drive space, but could not be
| accessed or deleted. This was about five years ago now.
|
| If there's one thing I hate about Apple, it's dealing with their
| support. So I call in, and convince three levels of tech support
| that, no, I'm not a total moron and I've tried deleting the
| errant file through a variety of different methods on my laptop,
| iPad, iPhone, etc.
|
| Finally they agree and I get stuck into a queue for an engineer
| to look at the issue. At this point it actually gets good- honest
| explanations (without details obviously) about what happened and
| what they need to do to fix it. Regardless, it took over two
| months from start to finish for the issue to be fixed.
|
| I did push them for some sort of compensation since I had to
| upgrade my iCloud storage plan as a result of this file taking up
| a significant amount of my storage quota. They gave me $50 to
| spend in the Apple store on accessories. I felt that was fair.
| offsky wrote:
| My rule of thumb that I try to get my family and friends to
| follow: Always control your own data on your own hardware and
| treat cloud storage as a convenience, not a necessity. And keep
| backups.
| Arjuna144 wrote:
| Good that this gets publicity but even more than anything else it
| shows how we should move away from centralized services and big
| corporations for essential services
| Shadonototro wrote:
| 3 anti-apple posts past hour right before WWDC, that's funny
| ksec wrote:
| Where is the other two ?
| Shadonototro wrote:
| https://i.imgur.com/Xbtg8US.png
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Either Apple is a large company who has issues just like any
| large organization or people just like hating on Apple.
| gabeio wrote:
| Two things can be true.
| amelius wrote:
| Strange thing is that anti-Apple posts on HN get lots of
| discussion about how Apple is bad. Then a few days later a
| new MacBook is released, and there is a post on HN where
| everybody is raving about Apple. Then the next day, everybody
| is hating Apple again. It's confusing.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| It would be interesting to see what percentage of HN
| posters flip-flop on this topic.
| Macha wrote:
| People who care about e.g. right to repair or other issues
| Apple's behaviour is poor for will be more likely to
| dislike Apple and comment on those posts, while people who
| are like Apple are more likely to comment on posts about
| the new MacBook or iPhone or other device
| slownews45 wrote:
| The repair folks and apple is such a weird relationship.
| My iphone lasts so much longer than android, the updates
| keep on coming much much longer (my parents android phone
| NEVER got an update and shipped 1 version behind at time
| they bought it). It's pretty dang durable, waterproof,
| and I've never had a problem getting it fixed (I use
| AppleCare+).
|
| Seriously, it seems from where I'm sitting if you want a
| reliable phone, one that holds its value, can be re-used
| and resold etc, get an iphone. I used to travel
| internationally and old iphones just had an INCREDIBLY
| long value retention period.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The better and longer lasting the basic design is, the
| more frustrating it is when some fiddly little part makes
| it inoperable and you can't replace it for no good
| reason.
|
| And AppleCare+ is not cheap.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Apple is good at some things and bad at others.
| donretag wrote:
| "I'll add that Apple operations engineering appears to function
| in a way that is more or less divorced from Apple support staff.
| Support staff appear to have to go begging for a coherent answer
| from systems engineers, who appear to treat such requests as
| unimportant. "
|
| This scenario has been my experience for pretty much every hosted
| solution.
|
| I know Elasticsearch really well. Was working at a company that
| used the Elastic Cloud (not AWS) version since the demands were
| not high. There was something very wrong at the host level, which
| was evident by the cgroups metrics. The support engineers
| basically used the same endpoints that a customer also has access
| to to debug problems. No insights at the host at all. Could not
| ssh to a box. It took a long time to get escalated beyond the
| support drones. Elastic Cloud was not worth it.
| wvenable wrote:
| This should be the experience everywhere. Imagine how hard it
| would be to actually get any work done as a system engineer if
| you're constantly responding to requests from the front-line
| support. The reason front-line support exists is to prevent
| that from happening.
|
| Admittedly things should escalated and fixed but giving answers
| to end-users is not a priority.
| cvwright wrote:
| Way back when I was first graduating from college, I
| interviewed at IBM for a "support engineer" role. It was
| pitched as a software engineering job, but focused on
| understanding customers' problems at a pretty deep level, and
| being the human interface between front-line support and the
| dev teams.
|
| I always thought it sounded like a good role for a company to
| have. Unfortunately such people seem to be in short supply.
| markn951 wrote:
| Welp, that is terrifying. This solidifies my conviction that the
| strategy when it comes to cloud services is to diversify. As much
| as is tolerable.
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