Several Apple Services Down
apple.com
apple.com
I'm off to see if I can get Greasemonkey to swap out the icons for icons like these on the AWS status page.
There's a screenshot in the comments of https://www.macrumors.com/2020/09/29/apple-icloud-services-i...
At the suggestion of several kind people here, I started publishing quarterly round ups of all the major outages on the StatusGator blog. We have lots of data about outages, though the last post took a mostly qualitative approach. Hopefully we can get more sophisticated with it in the future and be more quantitative, perhaps funding outages that affect or cause other outages.
https://www.protocol.com/apple-hires-cloud-open-source-engin...
Ops people also get tired of video conferences.
Ops people are used to working together in a room with stats, runbooks, subject matter experts at hand for consults, going to the next office over to get the people who wrote the code for the service to pop by and consult on how/why a service went down.
All of those procedures are no longer useful.
It's getting to all of us.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/24/technology/google-service...
Remember years ago when apple first shipped the iphone on AT&T and many cellphone calls just couldn't connect? I think it happened for multiple reasons all along the food chain when so many demanding phones came online. It took a while to build things out so things were less fragile.
Immune system response? In another analogy, Snowden showed us that the American gov + the NSA has literally monopolized their Corporate-DNA Crispr gene editing tool + corrupt laws spreading the disease of ‘Patents” and invention monopolizing ‘intellectual property’. It’s literally withholding the ability for people to take the steps they need to learn. Contrived scarcity [1]. I don’t understand how anyone can see this monopolizing system where Silicon Valley is the place of inherited privilege as anything besides the hypocritical shitshow that it is.
[1] "They assert a belief in ‘free markets’ and want us to believe that economic policies are extending them. That is untrue. Today we have the most unfree market system ever created [...]
How can politicians look into TV cameras and say we have a free market system when patents guarantee monopoly incomes for twenty years, preventing anyone from competing? How can they claim there are free markets when copyright rules give a guaranteed income for seventy years after a person’s death? How can they claim free markets exist when one person or company is given a subsidy and not others, or when they sell off the commons that belong to all of us, at a discount, to a favoured individual or company, or when Uber, TaskRabbit and their ilk act as unregulated labour brokers, profiting from the labour of others?
Far from trying to stop these negations of free markets, governments are creating rules that allow and encourage them."
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
People who left university and are now starting to work autonomously make more mistakes, it’s only natural.
> APNs can only relay messages up to 4KB or 16KB in size, depending on iOS or iPadOS version. If the message text is too long or if an attachment such as a photo is included, the attachment is encrypted using AES in CTR mode with a randomly generated 256-bit key and uploaded to iCloud. The AES key for the attachment, its Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), and a SHA-1 hash of its encrypted form are then sent to the recipient as the contents of an iMessage, with their confidentiality and integrity protected through normal iMessage encryption
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/how-imessage-sends-...
However, I cannot get this information without enabling JS and image display.
All for a small page with a couple lines of text.
Wrong.
Apple charges 30%, offers crap service, and developers shoulder the entire support burden.
Last I checked, Apple runs a lot through AWS which has a few DDoS resilient interfaces to the web very commonly being used by its customers.
As for other cloud provider outages, I doubt it's more than a coincidence if nothing has come out about the issue weeks after it first started - still possible there's some bad actor causing outages in ways that aren't detectable as botnet attacks.
I have lost all faith in Apple. I just hope their engineers have the decency to be ashamed of themselves.
At this point I skip updates until forced and I'm dreading the day my '14 RMBP finally spins it's last fan.
My work '17 MBP video driver crashes every time it resumes from sleep. The laptop kernel panics at least once a week. This has been true for the three years I have used it. I plan an extra 20 minutes on Monday mornings to unfuck my laptop.
My '14 RMBP can't run some resolutions in MacOS but they work fine in Windows on the same hardware. This is a known driver issue in MacOS and Apple refuses to fix it.
mail.app is a flaky mess as always. I added a fastmail account and my laptop became unusable until I removed it. Still no idea what that's about.
I just double clicked an image in the MacOS messages app because I honestly had no idea what would happen. Will it be a reaction or open a preview? It opened a preview (good) but of a completely different image (not good).
My experience, I have multiple macs in the house (7) with different hardware and OS versions and haven’t experienced none of these issues.
I use mail.app (multiple accounts including gmail, google apps, exchange, and others using smtp+imap), iWork, iCloud, and messages without issues. With the exception of iWork, the rest I use daily.
The only annoying thing is a delay on FaceTime which means that multiple devices might ring once more even though I already answered a call.
What stinks is how hard it is to successfully change in MacOS. Messages never seems to pick up the change to my iCloud account in settings. I have to go in and fiddle some settings to make it work again.
At my old job I had a '14 RMBP with a Thunderbolt display and everything worked flawlessly. The newer USB-C stuff is a major headache.
I use mail.app and messages every day as well. It mostly works but it still requires fiddling to make it work properly from time to time. Moving large volumes of emails is a major challenge. It requires several restarts of the app and a lot of fan spinning.
This is not normal and will be fixed under warranty like any other hardware defect.
> mail.app is a flaky mess as always. I added a fastmail account and my laptop became unusable until I removed it. Still no idea what that's about.
This is similarly not normal - possibly file corruption due to those panics?
The kernel panics are on a different laptop ('17 MBP) than the mail.app system instability issues ('14 RMBP).
Moving large volumes of mail has been a problem in mail.app for at least six years and remains a problem on both.
I’ve had three failed MacBooks in recent years to the point I stopped buying their laptops. Now using a custom built PC which is about the same grunt as a mid range Mac Pro but 1/5th of the cost. Oh did I mention Apple being too expensive?
It was a very frustrating experience in terms of the product quality, as well as the way they try to pick on customer's "fault" in order to cover the repair cost of their manufacturing defects.
[0] https://support.apple.com/en-hk/13-inch-macbook-pro-display-... [1] https://support.apple.com/en-hk/13inch-macbookpro-battery-re...
This is gotta be a management issue though. However, this trend has not reflected on their revenue negatively, management gotta be happy too.
But yeah I'm sure that's my fault.
After all syncing messages from iCloud is a highly CPU intensive operation. It's a miracle we can do it at all.
Nice. Would love these things to be as easy to set up as a new Apple device. Feel like that’s the 20 part of the 80-20 that these projects tend to leave out.
no kidding
I have technical expertise and that paragraph goes down like molasses.
Imagine if instead it just said
> Plug this in and you have a cloud in your own home.
Sure HN types might nitpick the use of cloud for self-hosted hardware but at least there'd be some hope for non-technical users
Because bitcoin still needs infrastructure to be useful to normal humans.
Think of bitcoin like pay pal[1]. Paypal or bitcoin itself doesn't help you if store is down.
[1] Not really but its 3am and that's the best i can come up with
There are only 3 countries with the resources to mount attacks of this magnitude...
But they don't. We're talking about the largest companies in the world, with facilities geo-located around the world, all going down within a few days of each other.
Only 3 countries have the resources for that: the US, Russia, and China.
Three days.
Pareidolia
Given that Russia and China have been identified as behind multiple previous outages, it's reasonable to assume they are behind these as well.
For example, the Google issue this week was an internal routing issue caused by some SRE modifying some config files on load balancers.
IF this is the case, what do we think this could be? What's common among the different outages?
Google says 9/24's outage was traffic routing hardware. [1]
Microsoft says 9/28's outage was authentication error due to a bug in a service update, deployment tooling error, and a bug in rollback [2]
Apple's has affected many services including Apple ID but it isn't clear what root cause is.
> Either you think the world is a much more perilous place than it is or you give programmers much more credit than they deserve
It generally isn't a good idea to make this many assumptions like this about people you don't know. I think neither of those things.
I promise you I can possibly know this.
What if some outages like this are the US government performing security attack testing to test infrastructure of PRISM-like partners (or just anyone economically important to the US), so that when real attacks come from cyber enemy states like China, things have already been probed to see what needs to be fixed.
Kind of like national security HIIT, so your body politic is ready for war. National security is about economic health too. It's all part of the one picture.
</creative thinking>