Access Denied to Apple.com | Hacker News Reader

Access Denied to Apple.com

apple.com

153 pointskozkozkoz75 comments

Someone who works for Apple — someone who is probably a lot like you and me — is having a really shitty night. So, I am sending good luck vibes towards Cupertino right now.

Godspeed, Apple friends! ️

Their phones aren't the only thing limited to 1GB RAM

If it has been offline for 1 hour now, do you think it is tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars is sales that were not processed in the timeframe.

The store was in read-only mode to prep for the new iPhones so the sales loss is already accounted for.

As a side note (and speculation), as compared with other online stores, I don't think the Apple store has the same risks as the other stores (the fact you don't buy the Mac directly from Apple doesn't really affect their revenue).

I don't think the impact is that severe. If you're planning on buying an Apple, and you visit apple.com and it's not up, then you wait until it's back up.

Consistent downtime can damage a brand, but this is just a hiccup.

I've seen this same style of error message before. It's the AkamaiGhost CDN. (Look at the Server: header in the response.)

I suppose you could say the server has given up the ghost...

Googling "AkamaiGhost 403" shows that other sites have experienced the same problems with them before in the past, so I wouldn't particularly blame Apple for this.

this guy know what's up.

A moment of silence for our fellow web developer/sysadmin who is on-call...

From now until his death, he will rest in peace no longer.

If it gets back online in time, it'll be a story to be told. If not, then :-(

Huh, you've been quoted on Twitter! https://twitter.com/nixcraft/status/642578143052587008

I've seen this error before from other sites and it seems to be generated by Akamai rather than the apple.com origin. Does anyone with Akamai experience know under what conditions this message would be returned? Did someone at apple accidentally ACL off the planet?

I posted my comment before to the wrong commenter, but: I'm interested in their References -- it looks like each hit is a new hash, so they store that so they can refer to it. I don't know much about this side of stuff so it'll be interesting to know why they do that, or what the upside is of doing it that way...

Akamai does indeed give unique reference codes for errors like these. There's a management interface where you can look up more info on what happened for each code, but in my experience lookup time is proportional to the time since the error happened.

This happens when a company uses Akamai's security product and you violate the security policy in place. It's basically a WAF. The big issue is it takes 45 minutes for changes to propagate through Akamai's network. So, you make a mistake and it takes fix time + 45 minutes to resolve.

Here's my guess:

Apple is using Akamai's cloud security service called Kona. They (Apple or their Kona team) pushed a bad config up and now that they know it's a bad config they are pushing a fix-- but it takes 45 minutes to replicate out to all the Akamai edge servers.

I think it's Kona because the 403 Access Denied and the Akamai ref number. Also, I use the same service and always live in fear of something like this happening and taking 45 minutes to undo. There is a staging option...

45min? And people pay for intervals that slow?

marketing magic, when you got ATS and only need smart people to set it up in any way you want (yahoo fucking does it) and still go to akamai

ATS = Apache Traffic Server I assume?

I still wonder why large companies continue to rely on third-party CDN's like this. It's hardly rocket science to operate a global network of reverse proxy cache servers, particularly when you only have to do it for your own network (i.e. no customer issues).

>There is a staging option...

staging. Where we are going we won't need no staging option...

Crap, now I can't stare at pictures of the 6s, wondering if it will be 6s-ful... #applepunsfordays

On a more serious note, it seems strange they wouldn't have failover environments for just such occasions... Maybe @Too is on to something, and this is a new way for big companies to drive traffic to their sites prior to a big launch. Genius.

That pun actually made me laugh though. (Impressed that you turned a number and a letter into a full word pun.)

Apple usually takes their store down prior to a big event (iPhone 6s pre-orders).

This is the first major event since they integrated the store into their regular website (rather than having the store.apple.com subdomain) Clearly, this is a mistake as they are deploying all the new pre-ordering pages for the iPhone 6s.

You are supposed to use the Apple app, not that old web stuff.

The white "Access Denied" page is to help you empathize with Jony Ive, still trapped in a white room after all these years.

https://www.change.org/p/apple-free-jony-ive-from-his-white-...

It's back up for me.

http://images.apple.com/ appears to be still be up though

"Siri, can you kill the Apple website"

(oh, shit!)

For anyone else who got here late: http://web.archive.org/web/20150912044113/http://apple.com

Someone violated read-only Friday.

Thus operational phase 2 begins...

Awaits first journalist to write a glowing story about how "Apple has revolutionised the 'Access Denied' page.

When Steve Jobs invented the computer, he envisioned a device which was accessible to anyone, a device to empower revolutionary magical thinking about the possibilities of access. But he also knew the limits of the networks developed by the establishment gray box technology industry and sought to imbue those networks with communication that would speak different, in a way they would understand. Along with Sir Jony Ive, he reinvented the "Access Denied" page by removing the skeuomorphic constraints, distilling them into a flat "Access Denied" message which spoke to everyone, empowering their engagement with their restricted access to unlock unlimited creative potential.

It's so clean. The UI is smooth like butter.

flawless use of negative space. this page is a real tour de force in efficiency

Starting at $999 for the basic and moving up to $1399 for the exclusive white version, you too can be unavailable at those critical moments.

"If you see a fail whale they blew it."

> how "Apple has revolutionised the 'Access Denied' page

Probably, the title would be "How Apple invented Access Denied page"

- Minimalist Design

- Only black and white. Colorful page may harm your eyes

- Border-less design

- Minimal but highly informative text on the page

blah...blah..

The same moment when I was going to buy the new iphone 6s

Yeah, pre orders start in just over 2 hours. This might be related to that

Who cares?

I used to do pager duty for a large consumer-facing company, so this is amusing to me.

Does this take down any important service, or just access to Apple's corporate web site?

If you consider their store an important service, then yes.

The most walled of walled gardens.

Funny to find this on the front page on HN, just got notified by Hooks app! Lol

Me too!

Yeah, this app is really real-time, got you to the frontpage on HN!

Yeah, I've posted just after I received a notification from Hooks :) Got lucky

Looks like iMessage is down too... someone is having a horrendous night.

Works fine here. I think it's on your end.

also a reddit discussion about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10207403

The service seems back to normal now.

Killed off the front page as soon as it hit >100 score. Went from being #1 to #148 within ten seconds.

It's back up

It's back up now, but

RIP CDN / Traffic Management team @ apple.

p0wned?

Works fine for me. What's the problem here?

Certainly this is the work of Microsoft working with Aliens.

Now that's what we call innovation.

How's this front page material on HN...

Oh no, apple.com is unavailable - breaking news, affects noone?

Not for nothing, it's a pretty rare occurrence to see a triple-a company with a white page error on its home domain, like seeing a whale or something.

its not the first time for this to occur (to other sites and apple earliar this year atleast) and has been answered by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10207316

akamai issue and the hash is a time stamp

I'm interested in their References -- it looks like each hit is a new hash, so they store that so they can refer to it. I don't know much about this side of stuff so it'll be interesting to know why they do that, or what the upside is.

It's probably just sent as context along the whole chain of requests and logged in wire logs.

Those sorts of request ids are usually just for piecing back together what happened from logfiles in my experience.

It makes my Sauce Labs tests on iOS devices fail, and I bet other people's fail as well.

I think the simulators usually try to load apple.com for some reason before the page under test, so it might just be selenium waiting forever for apple.com to load.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/apple.com

this is not some shitty grad student's website you know. you don't expect shit like this to happen...

that's how this is breaking news/front page news.

it affects customers who want to preorder their phones

zzzzz, just another pr stunt to pretend the demand is high. Just like hiring actors to stand in line outside the apple store every now and then. Or some sysadmin accidentally forgot to click enter somewhere. Nothing to see, move along.

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