Apple Entertainment Services are slow or down | Hacker News Reader

Apple Entertainment Services are slow or down

apple.com

100 pointsirsagent53 comments

I love how the Apple status dashboard actually goes red when services are down. You'd think that would be easy, but most companies prefer to lie with their dashboards to meet SLOs.

I agree. No BS, just the facts, of whether or not ther services are running

Slack is notorious for not reflecting issues on their dashboard

If slack chat is down and they use it internally, how would they know about outages. Probably would need sms

Slack the company does use Slack the product for inter-company communication. However, their Slack-inside-Slack is a relatively isolated "instance" of Slack on separate infrastructure for exactly that reason. The exact level of isolation/redundancy is not clear to me though.

Source: I asked a Slack engineer about this in-person. Maybe a real Slack employee can chime in with more info.

I think a Slack engineer would rather not use Amazon Chime!

Was about to say this. Kudos to them for actually conveying the information! They seem to have learned that what they're (partially) in the business of selling is long term trust.

I agree, but does Apple run a SaaS that has SLA of the likes of GCP say?

As if that okays the shenanigans of what the likes of GCP do.

Not at all what I implied.

They're also the only laptop or phone or tablet vendor I've ever purchased from whose battery life claims are anywhere near matching actual lived reality, even for very light use.

Yup. I have many things to complain about Apple but I love how they underpromise and things just work usually better than promised.

FWIW this wasn’t always the case, I distinctly remember when they effectively announced that they would stop skewing these numbers. It was also IIRC around the time they announced they’d stop using price brackets to charge more for certain upsells depending on which base config you chose.

Good on them for both! But I remember both as admissions that they’d been dishonest or manipulative prior.

Because Apple doesn't have enterprise sales agreements that include penalties for when these dashboards are red. Basically Goodhart's law in action.

If I were ever negotiating those contracts on the other side, given how we've known how people lie with these dashboards for like a decade now, I'd want to see a clause which states that if I can catch them having not updated the dashboard there is a really really serious penalty fee.

If you can build a fool-proof monitoring system that perfectly captures errors and uptime for a certain service, you can probably sell it back to them for a lot of money.

Companies can be fast and loose with their dashboards because no one can prove otherwise.

Nobody would agree to a contract where a bug in their monitoring stack or status website included a "serious penalty", even if intending to be completely honest about their status page.

I don't think it's a bug when a VP level employee has to authorize setting the correct status. That's a "works as designed. won't fix". Ticket closed.

You are being very generous in calling it a bug at best, or willful ignorance going the other way with it.

The point is that nobody is going to agree to this regardless of whether they are being honest or not, because of the possibility of a bug or oversight leading to 'serious penalties'.

If a service provider wants their decision about whether to honor the SLA to be based on what the dashboard says, then it's completely fair to require that they report accurate information through that dashboard.

A service provider always has the option of providing an SLA that's based on the true uptime of the underlying service without treating the dashboard as a definitive source of truth. Choosing to make the dashboard their official record of downtime means they're opting in to having inaccuracies in the dashboard qualify as fraud.

Basically all SLAs are as you describe - I've never heard of a contract that directly bases SLAs on a status page.

The reason providers don't want to update status pages is because it provides easy ammo for customers to say "look, YOU said you were down!" even if they weren't actually affected. It effectively greenlights an SLA lapse for every single customer.

> I'd want to see a clause which states that if I can catch them having not updated the dashboard

The coverup is worse than the crime. Yes!

Wow, a clean and accurate status page. Companies can learn from this.

The most surprising service in this page is probably:

Walkie-Talkie - Available

Have you ever made it work? I activelly tried multiple times with multiple friends and the best I could get was about 3 seconds of one-directional audio, with dropped connection right after.

I've spent good 20 minutes trying to get it to work with me and my wife, but we both sent each other 'invites' that never arrived and it stayed like so since.

We both are in "family" too. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I've had the same problem... invites never arrive.

When I first got my watch it worked great. A friend and geeked out about it for an hour while I was on a walk and I never used it again.

I was on a camping trip and we used it quite a few times just fine.

I find it weird on this thread and the other AirTags how everyone has such varying experiences with the hardware. My AirTags don't work often, everyone else's are fine. My walkie talkie works, no-one else does ...

WFM. Like a walkie talkie: you need to hold down the button while you record your message. The audio is one-way. Then the other person takes their turn.

Weird. One of my random contacts just sent me a Game Center friend request an hour ago... which I never use. I even forgot such a thing existed.

Started to think its related somehow.

Interesting. I woke up to find that my iCloud & App Store accounts got locked. I was able to recover my account by resetting my password though. I wonder if it's related to this outage.

Muy anecdote: could not work because mac was randomly popping up "please sign in to your apple id to use podcasts" popup, stealing focus and obscuring screen few times a minute. entering password resulted in "incorrect password" and a repeat popup. Got real strong malware vibes, did upgrade+reboot, it passed.

I wonder if its also related to this

Today I even called to a provider because of this. Music worked via cellular but didn’t via home wi-fi. It still works this way. Weird.

It’s not that weird —- if they have multiple data centers, your cell provider and home ISP may route you to different hosts. Given that they’re defining the outages as “some users” affected, it may be that only one of their DCs is seeing issues.

How do you make a domain point to different IP addresses depending on the user's network? I never understood how CDNs do this

The dns server has multiple answers in the database and has logic to determine which one to respond with. Normally it’s based on the assume location of the client based on IP of the query but it need not be. “Geo DNS”

In addition to GeoDNS as explained by my sibling post, this can be achieved not by making the domain point to different IP addresses, but by placing multiple instances of the same IP address in different points in the network (Anycast), and which one you hit is determined by routing policy.

Some CDNs 'prefer' one approach or the other, e.g. Akamai tends to use DNS, CloudFlare tends to use Anycast, but these days most have the capability to do both or mix them as appropriate.

Also a good chance you have an IPv6 address with your cellular connection.

First time I try to use Apple Podcasts and it is down. At least this explains why I spent 10 minutes messing with the app before giving up!

overcast is a pretty good alternative to apple podcasts if you are looking for something else

Try Pocket Casts too, much better for makingsure your regular Podcasts are downloaded before things go offline. I tried switching to Apple Podcasts and I found out the hard way that it didnt download my episodes before a 10 hour flight.

Apple Music is bad with this too. Even though it's what I use for streaming, I simply do not trust it to keep things locally if it decides it might have a better idea about whether I need disk space than it does. I use Castro for podcasts (inbox/queue works great for maintaining local downloads) and Doppler for music.

Seconded. Phenomenal app made by a single dev.

Although Overcast has some infuriating UI/UX nonsense (like not remembering where you are if you swap away from the app, searches not being sorted, etc.) and some weird bugs (sometimes when you play, it'll do a couple of seconds and then stop. Might be related to a previously downloaded episode being evicted from cache but handle that properly!)

On the other hand, it's the least worst podcast app I've tried on iOS thus far.

yeah i have no idea why you can't sort the list of podcasts manually but at least i figured out you can pin the ones to the top in the (iirc) reverse order you pin them. least worst podcast app is probably the best way to put it. pretty good but definitely could be really good with some ux designer love.

I wanted something for my computer. But yeah Overcast is solid for the phone

Well that might explain why I wasted the last hour trying to get an upload validated. Good thing I came here to procrastinate.

All Apple services have been for shit, the last week or so.

I submit TestFlight builds, several times a day, and it's been a crapshoot, as to whether or not it submits, or I get told my account is borked.

Opened the iTunes store an hour ago, searched "Handel", went to albums, but could not open any album. So yeah, it was down.

Both App Stores, Apple Music, Podcasts...wow these are all high-value services

haha. that's more of a fact. appstore is always super slow

app store aint down for me

Click on the individual service (or use the mobile site that doesn't require that) and you get this:

  Today, 2:03 PM - ongoing
  Some users are affected
  This service may be slow or unavailable.

It's not a total outage.

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