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Comment by trackztar | Hacker News Reader

If it weren't Sunday, I wouldn't speculate, but it is. My 2 cents: iOS7 updates galore. Just imagine everything that could be overhauled. Even the old gray textured background we see is not very much like iOS 7.

iOS is in a big transition here. You can't even update apps at all unless you now include 'widescreen' support, for example. If you don't, iTunes reports an Invalid Binary (no default 586 image, etc).

So I would guess a huge overhaul, and typical Apple, is taking care of that vs. arguing or commenting on theories.

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So I would guess a huge overhaul, and typical Apple, is taking care of that vs. arguing or commenting on theories.

A design overhaul wouldn't require the dev centre to go down at all - they could just prepare all the assets etc on testing servers and switch them over when they are ready.

Given the normal warning given on any maintenance, and the obvious negative consequences for Apple's business of any extended outage (extended in this case being over a day or so), this is unintended, and most likely caused by a security breach. I think we can safely rule out a design overhaul unless Apple are incredibly incompetent.

NB itunesconnect is still up (the bit which deals with app upload, itunes store metadata etc), only the dev center - dealing with certs/device registration/distribution etc - is down.

Perhaps they're also trying to pull together all the disparate things running on the dev servers?

nwh's comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078854 ) says they've got a lot of different systems running, maybe they're trying to unify them to be on one system, making upgrading/changing easier in the future?

It's possible this is some sort of migration gone wrong I suppose, there are a lot of pieces involved in the dev centre, and I've seen a few changes popping up over the last few weeks. Seems odd that they'd just pull the whole thing though without warning, rather than just rolling back to the last state. With a migration they should have a good known state they can go back to quickly if necessary.

No planned migration or consolidation should take several days of interrupted service, it's just not necessary unless something goes horribly wrong.

Maybe they deleted all the copies of the both new and old developer centres so are having to rebuild it all from scratch.

I would hope a multi-billion dollar developer portal has a backup somewhere. It'd be insane if they didn't.

You'd be surprised the kind of risky setups multi-million <currency> companies will run with.

Keep in mind, this is the company which takes their whole store down when they need to add new products to it.

Did you mean when they have their WWDCs? In that case it might be a marketing reason.

They take it down during WWDC keynotes and other major announcements, yes.

But there are other instances where the store will go down outside of those periods. Sometimes it's for maintenance, but more often than not a new or updated product appears (e.g. a product line gets a speed bump across the board).

If this multi-day outage was planned, and they didn't communicate it to devs (like they usually do) then this is a huge, huge slap to the face. It seems very unlikely.

Wouldn't they offer a warning that the dev center would be down if it's just a design overhaul?

Being sunday has nothing to do with it - notice the title is "still down" - it's been down since thursday. If this was planned, any sane company would give notice to their developers, Apple's success implies they're sane.

Don't forget that developers get 30%, when Apple show off (rightfully so) a huge sum paid to developers, they've been paid significantly more than that - developers seriously matter.

Developers get 70%, and Apple gets 30%, not the other way around. The sum paid to developers is substantially larger than the sum paid to Apple.

Oops, stupid mistake. Point stands that Apple gain a lot, but thanks for pointing that out.

If it were a design overhaul, it would be instant. Just do a `git pull` and restart the internet-facing servers. It also wouldn't take days.

I really hope you're right and the Dev Center returns without explanation, but with neon icons and a "flat" design. The backlash would help Apple to adjust its priorities again. (Services over fashion)

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