[HN Gopher] Apple Services Experiencing Outage
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Apple Services Experiencing Outage
Author : rock_artist
Score : 97 points
Date : 2025-12-10 20:47 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apple.com)
| gnarlouse wrote:
| I don't think I've every heard of an Apple Services outage until
| today.
| bombcar wrote:
| If the outages only happen to services that aren't used much I
| understand why.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Apple is one of the largest service providers worldwide.
| Services are their second largest revenue stream after the
| iPhone.
| justapassenger wrote:
| 1. About 25% of their service revenue is from charging
| commissions in app store and other 25% of the revenue is
| Google paying them for search default. Other services
| include things like insurance (applecare) That's not
| exactly same type services that most of the people would be
| thinking about.
|
| 2. A lot of their services have less criticality (and it's
| not a ding at them - it's often very explicit design
| choice).
|
| 3. App store having hiccups or iCloud backups being delayed
| it's not something that will usually gather enough
| attention of media.
| ctime wrote:
| You might be amazed to know how critical Services are to
| functioning Apple devices. While they mostly can run
| offline, there are dozens and dozens of services that
| Apple runs that modern ecosystems require (like
| certificate related stuff). Other oddball things related
| to iCloud, APNS and the private services like iCloud
| relay are all extremely critical to billions of devices.
| Thankfully the all mostly fail open (captive portal is
| particularly tricky). Not saying they are as critical or
| visible as, say, Google.com going down, but none the less
| would have a very very large and visible problem if they
| all did go down suddenly. Thankfully, due to Apple design
| philosophy, most are totally decentralized and teams are
| given almost complete autonomy on how services are ran,
| which makes them a huge confusing mess but also, kind of
| a feature as Apple generally expects them all to fail in
| odd ways and the software can generally handle it.
| crims0n wrote:
| Same... to their credit, even during the major cloud outages I
| don't recall Apple services going down.
| dabbz wrote:
| If I remember right they primarily use Google Cloud with a
| small mix of multi-cloud stuff for iCloud
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| depends on where in the world you live.
|
| If you live in a region where they operate their own data
| centers, you will be running on Apple data centers. If not,
| you're running on a mix of Google Cloud and AWS (IIRC).
| They used to use Azure as well, but I think that's no
| longer the case.
|
| In any case, your data is encrypted (by Apple) before being
| uploaded to Google or AWS, and only Apple has that key.
| Whatever E2EE encryption you use will be applied on top of
| that.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Even downdetector.com has nothing about Apple Services being
| offline: https://downdetector.com/search/?q=apple
| arprocter wrote:
| https://downdetector.com/status/app-store/
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| They're in double-digit numbers for complaints. Must be a
| new record :)
| fsflover wrote:
| macOS unable to open any non-Apple application
| (twitter.com/lapcatsoftware)
|
| 2603 points by mattsolle on Nov 12, 2020 | 1292 comments
|
| > I am currently unable to work because macOS sends hashes of
| every opened executable to some server of theirs and [it's
| down]
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959
| g947o wrote:
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/16/24158595/imessage-down-ou...
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/25/23041217/apple-app-store-...
|
| But indeed it's rare.
| jonas21 wrote:
| They have a major outage every couple of years. These don't
| have as much impact as some other cloud outages because they
| only affect Apple products, i.e. they're not hosting services
| for other companies.
|
| - https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/03/apple-investigates-app-
| store...
|
| - https://www.macrumors.com/2023/02/23/app-store-apple-
| music-a...
|
| - https://www.the-sun.com/tech/4944089/apple-maps-down-
| icloud-...
|
| - https://www.macrumors.com/2019/05/08/itunes-and-app-
| stores-s...
|
| - https://www.macrumors.com/2018/03/27/app-store-outage/
|
| - https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/02/apple-reporting-outages-
| for-...
|
| - https://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/11/some-apple-services-
| sufferin...
| rtkwe wrote:
| Do they offer many services for *OS apps or are they mostly
| independent and only service their own first party apps?
| cr125rider wrote:
| iCloud is the backend for basically any settings/file sync
| for normal apps.
| paxys wrote:
| But it is mostly used for periodic backup/sync. So you
| aren't going to really notice unless it is a very long
| outage.
| ben_w wrote:
| Theoretically they offer quite a few; in practice, I think
| nowhere or almost nowhere I've ever worked has gone for
| those options (except my own self-published games), instead
| preferring a custom solution that can be shared with web
| and android.
| amw-zero wrote:
| Half of the world uses Apple products, how is that not the
| maximum possible impact?
| dijit wrote:
| To be perfectly honest with you, I wanted to come here to say
| that their services (on a good day) aren't very reliable
| anyway.
|
| I routinely have email issues, file transfer issues (to icloud)
| and issues accessing their binary notarisation service.
|
| The only thing that works routinely well is Apple Pay, however
| I think that it's refreshing a key lazily in the background and
| does not actually need a network connection to work. Good
| design at least.
|
| So when I saw that they're having an outage, I thought. "All at
| once this time I guess".
|
| I'll be really open here and say that I applied for an SRE job
| there out of hatred because whoever is in charge of
| SRE/Infrastructure Operations at Apple is doing a terrible job
| (or has terrible circumstances).
| amw-zero wrote:
| that's a fantastic point.
| andersco wrote:
| Also seeing outages relating to App Store Connect, currently
| unable to submit builds to TestFlight.
| snarf21 wrote:
| The ASC website isn't loading correctly either.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Seems both TV and Music are affected, I wonder if it's some
| storage service somewhere just totally degraded. I love
| CloudFlare for their total transparency reports about outages. I
| wish every other company would follow the same standard.
| thoughtpalette wrote:
| Been using Apple Music all day today, streaming. Have yet to
| encounter an issue.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Must be a partial outage then? I was using Music earlier
| today as well. On my phone I download most of my music so I
| might never notice an outage though.
| temp0826 wrote:
| I had to try a few times to download from the app store this
| morning. Thought it was a dns/blocking issue on my part.
| jordemort wrote:
| Sorry, it's my fault, I migrated my playlists over to TIDAL
| earlier today
| rvz wrote:
| Looking forward to the post-mortem
| bitpush wrote:
| I'd be really surprised if Apple were forthcoming. Apple
| famously holds all cards close to the chest, so I dont expect
| anything from them. Happy to be wrong though.
| apparent wrote:
| Did this affect notifications/app updates? I found that podcasts
| from my third-party app were not showing up for me when they
| normally do. I would assume that when I manually refresh the
| list, that wouldn't rely on Apple servers, but given this outage
| maybe there's a linkage?
| sneak wrote:
| Apple services are realtime keys to:
|
| - activation: wiping an iOS/iPadOS/visionOS device, or
| reinstalling a mac after a full disk wipe
|
| - apns: push notifications, used for realtime notifications for
| _all_ apps on iOS /iPadOS, even things like Signal that do not
| use Apple's messaging infrastructure
|
| - imessage: enough said
|
| - boot ticket signing: required for any mac to do an OS update
| (it's serialized to the CPU's ECID)
|
| any one of these going down for any significant period of time is
| going to cause widespread global economic disruption.
| drnick1 wrote:
| And this is precisely why you need decentralized systems. It's
| absurd that text messages are routed through Apple's servers,
| or that you need Apple's permission to wipe a device.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > It's absurd that text messages are routed through Apple's
| servers
|
| Well, that's because...they're not text messages.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| If they were text messages, it's absurd that text messages
| are often routed through _two_ servers even!
| sosodev wrote:
| Aren't all text messages routed through a server? I guess
| it's more decentralized when it comes to telecom though.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| I don't think it's any more decentralized than Apple if you
| are talking about MMS (instead of SMS). Your carrier still
| provides the MMS servers.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| You need Apple's permission to wipe a device so when you
| steal a device, you can't wipe it and sell it. It's part of
| Apple's ongoing efforts to prevent stolen devices providing
| any value when stolen.
| fsflover wrote:
| If this is mandatory, then it's not really your device.
| seper8 wrote:
| Noticed this too earlier today. App Store apps not downloading.
| niwtsol wrote:
| This outage was affecting developer.apple.com and pushing iOS app
| versions to test flight/production. I thought I was going crazy,
| thanks for posting this.
| binsquare wrote:
| Failed to install/download newest xcode after updating Mac.
|
| Guess this explains it.
|
| Does Apple internally do something like COE's like Amazon?
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| Everything is working 100% for me
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(page generated 2025-12-10 23:00 UTC)