Apple iCloud account and sign in outage affecting some users for over 24 hours | Hacker News Reader

Apple iCloud account and sign in outage affecting some users for over 24 hours

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161 pointsreimertz113 comments

Upgraded my partners iPhone for Christmas. We went through the process for automatically copying everything over from the old iPhone to the new one.

First thing it told us was to bring the two devices near each other and ensure bluetooth was on. Did so. Nothing happened. Rebooted the old phone, and for some reason it then worked.

Secondly it told us to sit there and wait for everything to copy across in 5-10 minutes. Supplied no visual feedback of progress and eventually after about 25/30 minutes it just failed. Second attempt succeeded, but as before, no visual feedback of progress, which was annoying.

Not good enough, for the price of these devices.

The lack of transparency around this transfer process is weird.

It’s also aggravating that the device to device transfer acts like an iCloud Backup and doesn’t bring over files tagged to not cloud backup.

As far as I know, the only way to get a mirror of your original device that includes these configuration or data files from things like 2FA or wallets is still lighting cabled encrypted backup / restore.

I'm pretty sure the initial restore from iCloud when setting up a brand new device gives you the option to pull down everything or transfer stuff stored on the other device locally if you still have the old device nearby. If you restore from an iCloud backup later, you can't get other stuff, just the stuff in iCloud.

> data files from things like 2FA or wallets

do you have example apps? Authy and Mozilla Lockwise (iOS integration with Firefox password store) both copied over to my new device seemlessly: I only needed to give an "OK" to allow them to use Face ID to unlock and that was it. I didn't have to sign in or do any authentication other than biometric.

> Supplied no visual feedback of progress

That's kind of a trademark of Apple, they absolutely hate showing progress and detailed information about what's going on (maybe for design reasons? Who knows). When it does not work, there's generally no way to know what's happening and why.

This is my only complaint about apple really, give me more info, logs, real error messages ect.

Not that windows is much better

Windows used to provide hex error codes with nearly every error message that couldn't be translated manually. Very often, these error messages can be traced to a generic error message if you look in the MSDN docs. Helped me solve quite some annoying Windows issues back in the day.

Since Microsoft went the UWP route, these nice error codes have been starting to vanish. Probably because when end users see an error they don't understand, their mind goes blank and their instinct is to click whatever button that makes the error go away, leading to confusion. A simple "try again later" will be a much more enjoyable experience for non-technical people than "Could not update your computer. The foobar failed to parse the widget tree (0xc0000005). Try again later."

When I did customer service, this trend had always irked me about Apple devices. I've had to tell a lot of people to contact Apple (which they never did of course, silently blaming us for their device not working) because all Apple's software said was "try again later".

And now it's spreading to other devices as well. Even if error codes are available, the error messages have been simplified and most error codes aren't documented. I wish there was some kind of generic standard shortcut or gesture that copied the stack trace of any fancy exception to your clipboard so people with technical know-how can actually solve the problem instead of getting told to "try to reboot my router" by a vague, generic help page when Netflix can't find a video stream that matches my video decoding hardware.

Apple used to. I can't remember if/when they stopped but they used to be a regular occurrence at least in Mac OS 7

you can open the console and see all sorts of logging, its just often not useful or helpful or hard to find what your looking for in the deluge

Here's a compromise: "Something went wrong, try again later. Click here to see more details."

I would like to see more details. Sometimes I won't be able to interpret them, often I will be able to, and I'd rather be able to see why something failed so I can fix it.

A few weeks ago I scanned the Windows 10 BSOD QR code for the first time, out of curiosity. Since the BSODs no longer show any useful information other than the terse STOP description, I expected both that, the STOP code and the four parameters, perhaps also a link to that code's web page. Nope. Just a link to https://windows.com/stopcode

The problem (I think) is that as soon as a detailed error message is given (or some error code), sites will pop up all over the place telling you to download their software to fix “error code 0x80000008” or whatever. It’s so annoying searching a Windows error code only to have 9/10 of the results be generic SEO spam for some garbage software that (1) doesn’t fix the problem and (2) costs $40+.

Tangentially-related:

So we were looking at smartwatches available, and we were deciding between the Apple Watch and fitbits. I was surprised to learn the fitbits give you incredibly detailed data on the quality of your sleep but Apple watch doesn't... and I was thinking huh, that's strange, certainly the Apple Watch has the sensors to be able to produce the data and Apple has the engineering talent to make sense of the data and present it to the end-user in a meaningfully appropriate manner.

I can't find the article now, but apparently it came out from Apple engineers that they ultimately chose not to disclose detailed data to the user because burdening the end-user with this information can cause a mental overload... so instead Apple opted to focus on developing habits (hence the 'go to sleep' notifications and the clever sleep-hour alarms).

I've had some time to reflect on this since I was having these conversations with my acquaintances... and I've gotta say, I think I agree with Apple's approach.

If you wish to use an Apple Watch to collect sleep data until your head explodes, there are apps such as AutoSleep that will fill that hole for you. Until you arrive at the conclusion that all those data aren’t making you sleep any better, then you’ll just use Apple’s built-in.

> maybe for design reasons? Who knows

Maybe they care how the user feels about getting stuck at "99% complete" for long periods, caused by uncertainties. Seriously.

Yea, don't give them sudden uncertainty at the end of the process. Provide uncertainty the whole time, for consistency. Design Thinking!

Hah, sure seems weird, but for example tell a kid something will take a given amount of time, the kid will constantly ask if its ready ignoring the original estimate, and will get really anxious if you tell him it's taking way more time than expected. Then you will learn the easier way is to tell the kid "leave this to me, don't bug me, go play with your toys and I'll tell you when it's ready". That's the kind of psychology Apple is using here, from my perspective.

So, Apple views clients as petulant children?.

Also, I don't treat my kid that way.

That's probably how mass-market clients are seen for some companies... are they succesful? The answer points to a trend that should scare us. As a parent I also want my kids to be smarter than this.

They're inconsistent too. macOS updates have progress bars that give you an estimate for completion. iOS updates just show you a progress bar with no estimated time. And this is what I worry with macOS becoming more like iOS.

on the other hand, hold down 'v' at boot time on a mac and see all the error messages that have been there for YEARS and ignored the whole time.

If in your opinion the set up process was that disastrous, take it back? It sounds like you encountered a few minor issues during setup that was resolved with a restart. Not exactly the end of the world, nor unique to Apple devices. The process seems a little bit error prone but it’s still miles ahead of any competitor out there.

In my view, a manufacturer should work on software quality until they can state on the box "If there is ever one glitchy weird thing that requires a reboot to fix, we'll give you a full refund".

Error dialogs should say "An error occurred. Do you want the refund for your phone to be sent to the credit card you purchased it on? [Yes] [No]"

For me as a consumer, it feels like it would be far less effort to just reboot the device and get on with my life.

> In my view, a manufacturer should work on software quality until they can state on the box "If there is ever one glitchy weird thing that requires a reboot to fix, we'll give you a full refund".

As a developer, I fall very near the total perfectionist end of the spectrum in my preferences, but what you’re asking for would probably mean ~nothing ever ships.

It’s not that provably correct code is impossible, it’s that the economies of software (even free/open/labors of love) and physics (time) impose tradeoffs for the vast vast majority of software people write outside a research context.

I too wish software quality was substantially better. I put a lot of effort into not only making it better, but making it easier to make better software in the first place. But the level of perfection you’re describing is unrealistic.

That is probably true, but a zero vision is a very nice goal to aspire to (and perhaps not too unrealistic, who knows the potential of languages, hardware and new developments?).

In any case, tying quality to some tangible, bold measurement like refunds is not a bad idea.

Not necessarily a refund, but some sort of compensation could be in order. “A reboot has occurred. For this inconvenience, we have credited the CC associated with your AppleID $2, (or $5 Applebucks or a free coffee).” Design out the potential for gaming the system for infinite coffees.

If you impose a cost on a user, you compensate the user for that cost. I think that is the basic idea behind tort law. To keep lawyers and associated expense out of the system, do it voluntarily.

But if voluntary compensation of users is being ignored, a change in liability doctrine for software might be in order. Start with the biggest players who can afford the legal costs to resolve the doctrinal issues.

The target isn't zero errors. It's low enough that offering a refund to any user who sees one is financially viable.

You already offer a refund to users where the hardware fails. Why not the same for the software?

There are plenty of other branches of engineering with similar reliability goals. When I eat my lunch with a fork, I expect the prongs of the fork not to fall off... And so far, in my whole life of using forks, the prongs have never fallen off. The fork has been 100% reliable. It has always worked.

And before you say a fork is unrealistically simple, a metal fork is still the result of centuries of metalworking, casting, mining, etc. I'm sure some early forks did fall apart. But now, we have it refined, and they're close enough to bug-free.

I think the way to achieve it is to have a fixed feature set that you never add to.

I don’t think even your proposed solution would yield the results you’re seeking. Even if the software were provably correct and never updated, it has to operate on hardware. Hardware will fail. Battery life will degrade, screens will crack, power cables will fray. Even other (real) engineering disciplines don’t guarantee 0% failure, they guarantee tolerances.

Metal forks don’t lose a prong, but their prongs do bend. They do get scraped in garbage disposals. They do get hot when left too long on a heated surface. Some (silver) forks are considerably softer, amplifying those failure modes. And while I’m sure there must be fork vendors who offer solutions with guarantees against those failure modes—there are niche products for nearly every imaginable niche—the vast majority of people knowingly buy forks with these known limitations, trading some reliability for economy and utility. If everyone had the expectations you seem to have, very few people could afford forks at all, and they very well may not have been developed because the market would be so small.

Yes and what's worst some of these problem are not new.

Restoring a Backup from iOS 13.x to iOS 14.3 caused infinite reboot loop with the white Apple screen. And since Apple stopped signing iOS 13.x there was no downgrade possible. Apple Store refuse to help, which caused a bit of rage in Taiwan.

Corrupted iTunes Backup on Windows is still a thing. They didn't even bothered look into it after they introduced iCloud Backup. ( May be it is also a Mac thing but I have never seen or heard anyone having iTunes backup problem on Mac )

Yes, Not good enough, for a company with billions of cash and record profits.

I’ve even tried filing Feedback bug reports on lack of progress or inadequate progress displays and it always comes back as “working to spec” or “as designed” or some similarly-insulting thing.

Frankly, “designers” have way too much power at Apple. There seems to be no way to convince them that these things are ranging from poorly-designed to just plain broken.

I did this for someone recently too. It's was a mess, with a bunch of 2 factor authentication nonsense and timeouts to add to the drama.

And if that wasn't enough, this was all complicated by a broken screen on one of the devices. Turning on reachability helped since the smash was at the top of the screen.

Got partner a new 16” MacBook Pro, which came with Catalina installed. Tried to update and it spent five hours downloading Big Sur then said “the installer.pkg has failed gatekeeper verification” and deleted the installer. Tried again, says “1 day” estimated download time. Left overnight and this morning it has a gibberish error. This is a brand new out-of-box machine.

Half her games no longer work as 32 bit, and constant crashes from video card driver in games that do.

I mean, I like the ecosystem, at least with my Mac still on High Sierra, but have no idea how anyone actually using as a non-technical consumer side manages to deal with stuff like this. It reminds me of obscure setting fiddling in early windows.

Ha this is par for course for the Mac ecosystem. And if you say that it doesn't work, the response will be gaslighting: for example: you're holding it wrong, you're using it wrong, you're installing it wrong, you're not supposed to play games, old software are no longer runnable for your own good, etc

I’m not sure if these issues are widespread. I use a MacBook for work and have a personal one at home. Updates generally just work — I was promoted to install Big Sur. I made sure the charger was plugged in, and then I left it running for a bit while I was doing other stuff around my home.

I’m not saying issues don’t exist. Maybe I’m lucky? I wonder what percentage of machines are actually impacted.

I don't think you're lucky. We hear about (and people complain about) these issues because they are the exception. Apple has done a good job to the point where everyone thinks Apple products should just work. And, for the most part they do.

I think Apple's problem here is that when they don't just work, Apple has not optimized for that experience. And that lack of optimization is mostly around communication.

Lack of communication has bit Apple other times. In the battery slow down case for example. Slowing the phone down was the right move, but not communicating what was happening was the issue.

This seemed to be better a few years ago. More recent macos versions suffer from more problems due to T2 and all the mess that goes along with that.

Have you ever tried to recover a system that is one of the factors of 2fa? People spend hours on this typing in answers to security questions and figuring out how to get around stuff that apple is actively preventing you from doing.

Well, there may be a kernel of truth, perhaps one day Apple will, for example, launch a product that can only be held within say a 350 degree arc for whatever reasons claiming it’s a superior solution. And that may be correct.

Hopefully if that’s the case the limitations and conditions of usage will be clear.

Why ruin a lovely brand new macOS install by transferring an old one on to it? That's like pissing in virgin snow!

He said the new Mac came with Catalina (that's the old OS). The new OS that came out a month ago is Big Sur. Thus your comment makes no sense.

For games, your best option on an Intel Mac is Windows 10 through Boot Camp.

My general practice with macOS has been to wait about 10 months before upgrading to the latest OS. I upgraded to Catalina just a few months ago. I won't be going to BigSur until late summer next year.

I normally follow that pattern too — but Catalina was unbearably slow in comparison to Big Sur for me. My new 16” MBP with maxed cpu and RAM regularly took nearly 2 minutes to boot to my Home Screen on Catalina with no startup apps. Regular apps took over a second. Upgrading to Big Sur made my laptop feel fast again. The only downside right now is that it feels like I’m always charging this thing. My 2014 MBP unfortunately still feels faster running on High Sierra though.

I used to follow this same practice as well, however I am going on an indefinite holding pattern until Apple fixes the exceptions they grant their own applications so an application firewall can no longer filter their traffic.

Still haven't seen any updates as to whether this problem has been resolved since it broke out in the beta days or in the days preceding the official release.

The solution is to DOWNGRADE to macOS Mojave - the last good Intel macOS where no app is discriminated based on their bits, and everything just works fine. :)

Apple put a security check on my unchanged, 20 year email account last week. After contacting a chat helper and changing the password, it was resolved. The rep said "you are what makes Apple, Apple!"

Overnight (five days ago), without any activity on my side, an ominous security lock appeared on that email account, and much effort was made with a contact at Apple who required my phone number with a call-back, and almost did not clear up the condition. I do not own a "smart" phone here in California! It was obvious that they are connecting phone numbers with data profiles, which I have assiduously avoided for a decade. Why was the first contact not sufficient, and why add insult to injury with smarmy customer praise, only to then do exactly the opposite of what was said? yuck

edit- I am furious about the whole thing. I did nothing to start this, and use the email for super-ordinary things. It seems obvious that some tipping point has been reached within Apple Inc., such that two-factor authentication with or without consent, is now more important than customer satisfaction and good-will.

>> two-factor authentication with or without consent, is now more important than customer satisfaction and good-will.

I'm sorry, but what sort of pointless stupid rant is this ?

Its 2020, surely as a contributor here on ycombinator, you must be tech-savvy enough to know how much of an increasingly GOOD THING(TM) two-factor authentication is in this era of key-loggers, phishing etc. etc. ?

No doubt you would be the first person to start shouting from your rooftop with false claims about how bad Apple's security was when your account got hacked, carefully ignoring the fact you had not bothered to turn on 2FA.

Two-factor is fine as long as SMS isn’t the only way for the second factor.

Not to mention, many times, SMS becomes the only factor.

2FA is great, but the only options Apple provides for 2FA are SMS/call and a proprietary 2FA that only works if you have an iDevice. If you don't own one and you don't want to give Apple your phone number, tough luck.

Neither TOTP nor FIDO2 is an option, as they would be for most other accounts.

2FA through SMS is unfortunately the norm..

I own a "dumb" phone and a yubikey, and guess what: 95% of servies online from Jira to Uber or Instagram/Facebook will not let you use a yubikey without setting SMS as the main and first recovery process, and sometimes just not let you use a yubikey at all anyway. Which is absurd in 2020 but apparently that's still where we're at.

IIRC Github, Bitwarden and Google have done a good job with that and my yubikey can at least be put to good use there.

It hasn't been quite that bad in my experience, but perhaps I've gotten lucky re: the services I use. (But yeah Facebook... their track record here is not great: https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/yes-facebook-is-using-your...)

I have a mobile plan that only works within the US, and I just buy a temporary SIM whenever I travel - meaning I have a completely different phone number until I get back. If I had to get into my iCloud account for whatever reason while traveling overseas and I was using an Android phone at the time, I probably would not have been able to.

Why not give people a choice? Push everybody but give them an option not to? There are a few devices I specifically don't want to turn 2FA on, but someone else made that decision for me.

If you give people one choice, you have 2 different user cases to deal with. If you give people choice over two two separate, you have now 4 different casess...

Companies like Apple limit the choices so that they can provide single user experience. Users are bulk mass for them, not individuals.

If you use Apple products, you are paying for not to have a choice.

Requiring two factor authentication via SMS is not acceptable and should be downright illegal. I will never use it unless I have absolutely no choice.

It completely discounts all the people that ever leave one country and spend time in another, and I've been permanently banned from some apps (Tinder was one) just because they have absolutely no option, support, or recourse if you can't access your old phone number.

No, American Tech Company, I will not be quitting my job, spending 20,000$ and a month of my life on plane tickets and sitting in hotel quarantine just to get an SMS just because you it didn't occur to you that sometimes people are in a different country to the country they were in before.

> Overnight (five days ago), without any activity on my side, an ominous security lock appeared on that email account

This usually happens because someone else tried to access your email. It can happen either when someone with a similar email address mistypes it, or when someone is trying to gain unauthorized access to your account. I have a friend with a very common name and he regularly receives other people's email because they give out his email address without realizing it. They say, "Oh yeah, my email is JohnSmith@gmail.com" when actually my friend has that address and theirs is JohnWSmith@gmail.com, or whatever.

I hate it that other people can lock you out of your own account. I am pretty sure someone attempting to log in many times to my account was the reason Twitter switched to phone verification due to "suspicious activity". It happened after I had a seemingly calm debate over some IT stuff. So now I have to verify via phone to log in to my account, which I will not do. I can, however, create a new account that uses e-mail verification, until it switches to phone-only again. Terrible.

Oh, and I just made a new account today. It already started bothering me: "We've temporarily limited some of your account features". Come on. This time it is about "Pass a Google reCAPTCHA challenge". Next time it will be phone verification. I will not bother with Twitter if it happens.

Am not an Apple user, was tasked with setting up a new Apple ID for a parent's iPad today. Took an hour, one of the most unpleasant computing experiences I've had in recent memory, and I deal with embedded Linux systems.

14 OTPs sent to their mobile number, frequently being dumped back to the login screen. Maybe this was the reason, but damn this has discouraged me from ever going into their walled garden.

>Took an hour, one of the most unpleasant computing experiences I've had in recent memory, and I deal with embedded Linux systems.

I'm pretty sure you've had tons of opportunities to spend far more than "1 hour" diagnosing, fixing, and handling some hair pulling desktop/server/embedded Linux issues - even when there was no outtage involved.

Did these equally discouraged you from ever going into desktop/server/embedded Linux?

Handling servers and embedded Linux is much different than setting up an iPad, which is a consumer device...

Indeed, purpose was illustrative hyperbole - I am used to frustration. Consumer devices come with less expectation of frustration, a justified expectation setting up Android devices, games consoles, Chromecast-type things, etc.

Yes, but that's neither here, nor there.

First, because we could also have server-class devices that are quite easy to setup (similarly to how consumer PCs where much harder to setup in the past and are much easier now). We just come to not expect it, but that doesn't make consumer vs server something that inherently justifies "more difficult to setup".

Second, because the "spend 1 hour to add an account on an iPad (and during an outtage at that)" is far from the common behavior of the iPad, to be representative of some inherent issue with it.

So, it's more like "I had a quite unlikely and unrepresentative experience with an iPad and it put me off from such devices, whereas I tolerate the same far more often from servers and desktop machines and don't think twice about it".

Which, put that way, is much less potent than "that damned iPad and Apple's walled garden wasted 1 hour of my life, I'm never going back to those", isn't it?

If we're talking server class, then the average experience for me is a lot easier than what setting up that particular device was.

From the perspective of an individual, whether or not your experience is representative of most people's experience of a similar thing only has moderate relevance. Most people find serial killers to be normal, or even charming. This is of little comfort to victims.

> So, it's more like "I had a quite unlikely and unrepresentative experience with an iPad and it put me off from such devices, whereas I tolerate the same far more often from servers and desktop machines and don't think twice about it".

Sounds just like "I am a Mac user installing Linux on a cheap best buy laptop and whoa it doesn't work as well supporting a pretty obscure config that macOS would never even boot on, but am going to compare to my top of the line MBP and complain".

How about "I'm an long-time UNIX user, having used and worked professionally on SunOS, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris before "package managers" were a thing, have used Desktop Linux in many varieties since around 1997 (Red Hat, Corel, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, and others (including brief stints with FreeBSD), am all this time using Linux professionally for server work (solely Debian, Ubuntu, and Centos), and have used Windows since before 3.1 was a thing, and I still enjoy my Mac more"?

You missed the point. The point was how Apple users are also keen to dismiss an entire OS based on a singular, unlikely, bad experience in the same way OP was willing to write off the iPad based on his experience setting it up.

Not him, but the difference to me is that all of those systems are meant to be amenable to debugging - you can't run strace on an iPad.

It wasn't because of the outage, I had the same experience setting up an AppleTV a couple of months ago. It seems like the whole "it just works" motto only applies if you use nothing but Apple products. It actually made my wife decide to not buy another macbook because of how transparently user-hostile the setup was.

Not doubting your experience, because from what I've read when Apple fails it often really fails. I also think people rightly expect a perfect experience from Apple. It's the bar they themselves have set.

With that said, what part of the failure mode was user-hostile? I have an ATV, various Chromecasts, and Amazon streaming devices, and the ATV is by far the best, most reliable experience. My only complaint is the price, and if they were cheaper they would be on every TV in my house.

ATV is not even a “walled garden”, app runs on lots of things, even Xbox, for instance.

Funny enough, I can’t get my dad to run the Apple TV app on his Xbox. He switches inputs, he can’t wrap his head around Apple TV being on or in the Xbox!

You are talking about the app, they are talking about the hockypuck sized Apple TV device. These are not the same thing.

Yes, I and he have both. That’s why he switches inputs to watch on the physical Apple TV device.

Occiasionally it feels as if hurdles are placed specifically to make Google and Apple integration a pain. They're waging war and consumers are paying the price. We should hold them accountable, but the decreasing expectation of interoperability will make that harder and harder to do. The antitrust proceedings could help improve this situation, but consumer-protection organizations will have to fight to prevent the outcome leading to an even more hermetic oligarchy.

Wait until you lose the secondary 2FA device. Then apple just locks you out because Apple owners apparently don't get robbed or lose their phones.

Losing a factor is a potential problem in any 2FA scheme.

Apple though directly contacts another one of your devices, regardless if you still own it. If you don't own it...well, good luck contacting support getting it unlocked. It's gonna be a fun week or two proving you're who you are to apple.

Also no, with Authy, as long as I have my master password somewhere, I can still login and get my 2FA codes.

> Apple though directly contacts another one of your devices, regardless if you still own it.

Just so I'm clear, you're saying Apple sends a 2FA request to devices that are no longer tied to your AppleID? That seems like a huge security hole, and one I'm sure they would like to have reported.

> Also no, with Authy, as long as I have my master password somewhere, I can still login and get my 2FA codes.

Keep in mind that while Authy is great, it does weaken 2FA a bit. Now a hacker can hack Authy and then gain access. In a maximum secure 2FA setup (with a hardware token or Google Authenticator that is tied to the device), if you lose the second factor it's supposed to be hard to get access. Some companies even tell you up front, that if you don't have the codes shown when setting up 2FA, and you lose the 2FA you lose your account.

Since that’s not how any of that should work, perhaps either it was ID trouble related (ID troubles hit Azure/O365, AWS, and Google in Dec, Apple’s got company here), or there’s something odd in the setup you’re shooting for?

In the small, iOS devices are one of the few things I can set up fresh for technophobes out of the box and over the phone.

In the large, while bringing Apple ecosystem BYOD into a 15K employee bank, we got to see a good amount of setup challenges with various lines of phones, laptops, and desktops (main competing products were Surface, Microsoft’s first party line), and these are the ones that cost us the least to support.

The flip side of your experience are my wife and my phones which seamlessly and with zero telco/carrier interaction, upgraded both phones to new hardware (11 to 12) while bringing over both dual SIM card and eSIM plans.

First time I’d seen the “We found an applicable cellular plan that could work on this phone, want to bring it over?” (paraphrased) dialog box. There’s just no way clicking OK on that is going to make Verizon, T-Mobile, or AT&T do the right thing — but it does, in seconds.

Both also used the new device-to-device content transfer rather than iCloud restore from backup, with devices usable again in under 45 minutes from start, complete with watches and headphones etc repaired to the new devices.

Maybe I’m jaded, but damn this encourages me to evangelize their well-curated garden.

Do you have a VPN on the router level? Or a PiHole banning Apple servers? Or have you used Linux to try to log into the new Apple ID? Or disabled location services not only for apps but also for system services? I think Apple uses all of those as a sign of "suspicious" activity. Whoa, a pro user, that's suspicious! Jokes aside, I do all of those and had some problems with Apple ID (not as bad as you described) that went away when I temporarily disconnected the VPN, DNS set to 9.9.9.9 and Apple services where whitelisted in Lulu firewall for macOS. But also possible it was connected to the outage and some caches kept being evicted.

Side note: To me it seems a lot of people rushed to activate their new Apple devices on the Christmas day. I was expecting the pandemic to have people to cut down on purchases that were not strictly necessary. What did I miss?

I had a similarly bad experience today. I just wanted to share my iTunes library with my daughter. I have an MBP and she has an iPhone, should be easy right? Nope - since we don't pay the monthly feudal tax for Music, I had to fish out an obscure "sign in" in Settings -> Music, literally the last option on screen. Why do I have to sign in with my Apple ID on her phone, despite her account being defined in my Family already, just to share a few files? The only logical answer is "because you really should pay the monthly submission fee to Lord Apple". And of course I expect this will stop working as soon as she steps out of the house.

Honestly, it didn't use to be like this. Hey Tim, you should at least pretend you're caring about something more than your profit margins.

Many things such as app purchases can be shared, but apple music family plan does cost more than the individual plan. The workaround is to add (as you did) both devices to the same icloud account. AFAIK (i am not an expert on this)

iTunes used to support "iTunes Library Sharing" such taht you were more or less streaming your tunes from your library to the receiving device - anyone on the same wifi network could share libraries.

Now Apple Music is terribly confused about owned music versus streamable music. I haven't tried the owned library sharing in years, but I have problems trying to get tracks I own into audio processing apps - they should just be available, but it seems I have to download the track in Music first, then wait some unspecified amount of time before the audio is allowed to see it. The whole things counters the convenience I thought Apple was selling.

I say this as an Apple fan who uses almost exclusively their devices: iCloud is hot garbage. It mostly works if you stick to the default settings and use it for nothing but passive device-backup and photo-backup for a single iPhone. Anything outside of that is a mine-field of login errors, sync issues, totally unconsidered use-cases, functionality that's simply broken (not just under special conditions; flatly broken), etc.

General purpose automated storage solutions are in general hot garbage. There is so much context around what to store and what not to store, how long to store it, and how important information is for a user willing to expend and prioritize resources that it's highly variable and subjective on a per person basis.

"Cloud" storage services have taken the "save everything, worry about it later" approach since context is an issue and people are paying for this lack of data storage understanding with service agreements for never ending storage demands.

It's one thing to setup backend infrastructure and manage the storage transparently to the user for your application needs--you're the developer, you understand the context of what is and isn't important in the frame of the application. Here's a case of even that shooting developers in the foot.

I've never had a problem with Dropbox. In fact I'm extra glad to have it with my iPhone, because it backs up my photos in a way that I actually have confidence in. Unfortunately it can only do so while the app is open, because iOS doesn't expose a third-party API for doing photo backups in the background.

If you give it Location access it wakes up as you move around and does a little backing up until the OS puts it back to sleep.

I hardly ever open the Dropbox app manually but I see my photos from my phone appearing in Dropbox when I check on other devices. Slightly delayed (a day maybe) but that’s fine. It’s just for backup.

You can check that Dropbox is trying to do this by looking for the ‘Improve Background Uploading’ setting in the app’s settings page, and enable Location access in the OS settings for the app, if that makes sense!

I use iCloud for the passive device backup and never had any issues. Occasionally I might log in from another non Mac machine to pull down PDFs or other files.

What specifically are your use cases? I imagine the majority of Apple customers are probably doing what I’m doing.

I wonder if your use cases are what Apple is trying to solve for.

iCloud is a lot like Maps (and in some cases Siri). It was rough, but has gotten much better.

I migrated over to Big Sur yesterday and rely on iCloud Drive for storing all my dotfiles / initial setup scripts, using symlinking between home directory and iCloud.

So a consequence of my solution is that I am stuck now, waiting to be able to sync.

This has happened before and I promised myself to migrate from iCloud if it occurred again so I guess this will be one of my New Year’s promise.

On a side-note; due to the ability to add .nosync to a folder / file, resulting in content being ignored by iCloud, you can have a pretty decent folder structure.

For example;

- Work

  - A Company name

    - invoices
    - illustrations 
    - documents
    - repos.nosync (everything in here is ignored)

The problem is if you accidentally git clone into a directory that is synced, iCloud basically blows up rendering both the computer you work at unusable since it won’t sync properly, but also other devices since it’s trying to sync node_modules containing 500 000 files.

Would have loved if iCloud Drive supported block lists - would have solved so many issues.

The lack of encryption has put some pressure on myself to delete all my icloud backups and not rely on it anymore, but holy hell it never even occurred to me what havoc would happen if you put a coding project in a directory that's monitored by iCloud!!

I ran into this trying to setup my new phone yesterday. It was annoying, and frustrating compared to the rest of the experience. For instance, I was shocked (and delighted) that I didn’t need to move my SIM card over.

But the sign in just failed, silently. It was especially annoying because my password is long and complex, and until I got my password manager installed I had to type it by hand. I eventually gave up and went about my day. It worked later in the afternoon for me.

Unable to activate a few Christmas presents the day after, assuming this is due to many new Apple devices being unwrapped and turned on all at once.

This is rule #1 of any tech gift.

Install all updates before Christmas morning.

Initial setup on computers, game consoles, and phones is always time consuming and error prone. Add in the massive updating DDOS which we call Christmas and millions of kids are deprived of hours of gaming on Christmas Day when their parents buy them a console and fail to follow this simple rule.

Apple screwed up here... but if you'd just followed rule #1 of tech gifting, you'd have been in the clear.

So much for it "just works". I think Jobs would be appalled at what Apple has become.

This isn't just Apple. And it was an issue while Jobs was around too.

Or did you think iPods came pre-loaded with 500 songs? When you bought an iPhone 10 years ago when Jobs was around, did it come pre-activated? A poster in this thread is complaining about buying a Mac with an old version of MacOS and needing to upgrade it. Apple can't update software on a computer while it's sitting on the shelf at Best Buy. Or did Apple forget the magic "Update while in the box" technology which was around when Jobs was alive?

Nobody in your family spend Christmas Day waiting for their Playstation to install its first update?

Hell, a small fraction of electronics fails to boot up every year. Just verifying that the new toy you bought a loved one boots is a good idea before you have a disappointing holiday.

I agree. Though I wonder if Christmas is a bigger iOS activation day than iPhone release day each year? I haven't had a problem activating a new iPhone on release day in years.

Thanks for sharing this!

I ran I to this while setting up a new MacBook for my in laws. The symptom was that it would say that their iCloud security code was wrong.

Terrible experience. It nearly resulted in us resetting the account, which would have wiped all of their encrypted files. Migration assistant would also silently hang.

Wish I had thought of checking this status page.

I've had a similar experience a year or so ago when trying to resurrect an old apple account so I could listen to the DRMmed music I "bought" when I was young and stupid. I got inconsistent, confusing error messages when trying to sign in and authorize playback. None gave the correct answer, which was that I was trying to use the incorrect account for that track.

There are some parts of the Apple ecosystem which are so obviously unloved and completely un-QC'd. Same with the app store, it's like no employee has actually tried using it.

Any chance this is related to that bombing in Nashville that took out some major communications services? Sometimes a big disruption in one area can cause problems with seemingly unrelated services far away, and Apple does have a major data center in the South (although I think the only thing they have in Nashville is an office and I don't know what they do there).

Extremely Unlikely. Datacenters typically have multiple redundant and diverse paths for connectivity. Meaning they'll have all the bandwidth they need over 2 or more carriers, leaving 2 or more directions of their datacenter.

If one ISP was having issues, they'd simply "turn down" those connections for a time and fail elsewhere.

Ohh, we spent aaaages yesterday trying to set up my brother's old iPhone for my dad. All the OTPs failed, even though we wrote them correctly. His iCloud didn't want to log in and resetting the password (as we thought we had the wrong one) just left everything in limbo. Apple support were less than helpful.

This happened to me. On my phone and on my MacBook, I kept being asked to sign in. I was confused because I didn’t do anything that would require me to sign in again. I assumed that it was some security thing since I had been signed in on both devices for many months. After a while, I decided to sign in on my MacBook and then that changed some setting with iMessage messages syncing between devices.

What we have in this thread is a bunch of IT professionals that will be understanding or demand understanding from others when their systems fail at peak times but when someone else's systems fail under peak they're very damning of the others.

Eh, we have one of the biggest days for one of the biggest companies whos principle is it just works, and they have the biggest fail of an outage on their super bowl. I think the criticism is valid.

Load testing for cyclical holiday traffic spikes is not a new or difficult concept. Most retail companies do it annually around September-October, IME.

But the cause of the outage is still speculation. I hope that something else caused it, because Apple's customers are right to expect Apple to undergo that kind of baseline preparation.

Once when I was setting up my mom's iPhone I couldn't get the app store working because whenever I tried to download something the app store went white.

Trial and error told me that some apple id page was supposed to come up, but wasn't. Just a blank screen.

Tried a couple hours later, it was fine. Meaning their server went down and they didn't even bother to code up an error page. Super lazy.

Unsure if related, but I cannot open my pending ticket with them. Direct link redirects to the main page with the message:

"Apple support options are currently limited. Thank you for your patience and understanding."

that one developer made some big commits on frida and pushed them to prod.

then went on vacation

They might learn their lesson

Microsoft is making an azure wide change to how key vaults behave at midnight on the 31st which seems equally as silly

Probably a very limited set of users or this would be all over the news already

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