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Apple's Developer Center Experiences Daylong Outage
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chrono1081
macrumors G3
Wha???
Please tell me its easier to do in XCode than it was through the portal. I hated using that portal and the provisioning system never made sense to me.
I also hated how you couldn't delete expired certificates.
Wow. Talk about parroting a misunderstood argument.
Websites are not "the cloud". "The cloud" Apple sucks at is a different cloud to what you seem to think "the cloud" is.
This, most definitively, is *not* a sign that Apple sucks at "The Cloud" or even at its own cloud.
Stop parroting arguments heard elsewhere, they have the opposite effect and just get diluted and become little more than bland memes.
"The Cloud" apple "sucks" at is related to services and APIs for online functionality. You might want to stretch the concept of "The Cloud" pointlessly to include things like Ping or MobileMe/iTools (although you'd start showing not understanding what "the cloud" is supposed to be).
Most definitively, a big part of iCloud, for example, sucks balls.
But bringing down web pages for maintenance (regardless of how well/bad it goes) is a design decision, not Apple sucking at "the cloud". That the different Stores still use WebObjects is a design decision and, within its idiosincrasies, it works OK (I'd change it, but because I like modern systems and methodologies, not because they "suck", although a BIG part of Apple's marketing is now bringing down the stores and they'd keep doing it -and it would be OK- even if they didn't need to).
They are approaching 48 hours of down time for an unannounced maintenance effort. This smells more like a unexpected problem of some sort than a maintenance effort.
petvas
macrumors 603
I think we are approaching three days of downtime. It started on Thursday and now it's Saturday...this is unacceptable by any means. There are so many ways to update websites and web servers with very little or no downtime. I wonder what Apple is doing. Incompetence in this area seems an obvious reason...
springsup
macrumors 65816
Yup 🙂
Pleased to report that it is much easier to manage that stuff via XCode.
See here: http://developer.apple.com/library/...pment/ProvisionYourDevicesforDevelopment.html
With XCode 5 it's getting even better - it'll manage essentially everything for you.
chrono1081
macrumors G3
WHY was this not in their new features video!? (At least the one I saw). The fact that you can fit the instructions all on one page amazes me alone!
I know what I'm going to set up today (if I have time). This is awesome! Thanks for letting me know about it!
The original report said 7:30 AM PST Thursday. Its now 7:45 am PST, which is a shade over 48 hours.
Clearly they have a big issue of some sort.
AxiomaticRubric
macrumors 6502a
At this point I'm convinced they are dealing with a major security breach, and possibly tons of lost or corrupted data thanks to skilled crackers. 🙁
Of course no one will know for sure until this is resolved, but it *never* takes nearly three days downtime just to update a website.
And it's clearly more than just the developer portal interface itself. Most if not all of the resources tied to the developer portal that have been taken offline too, such as the WWDC session videos.
gmanist1000
macrumors 68030
needfx
Suspended
gerwitz
macrumors newbie
So they've taken down videos because of a security breach? I don't follow your logic.
Seriously. My eyes bleed a little each time I use my iPhone. No, really, they do, it hurts my eyes.
This site's like Lindsay Lohan, it's always down.
nice spin, but the simple fact is that Apple is completely clueless with respect to maintaining native/web apps that access a large hosted dataset with basic ACID (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID) properties.
Apple makes a great consumer desktop/mobile operating system. They will never attract the talent to manage these large data sets. Why? Because Apple doesn't understand open source development. Apple doesn't understand data center design. HFS+ is grossly outdated, and they abandoned engineering on ZFS.
This, more than anything, is Tim Cook's greatest failure. Federighi is great, but this sort of culture needs to be instilled and blessed from the big man. A Duke MBA couldn't be further away from the type of people they need.
Notice I didn't make any soft of claim that Google was 'more open' than Apple, but Google attracts talent by funding GSoC, LISA, Usenix, etc. Culturally, Apple just doesn't understand these communities.
Last edited:
springsup
macrumors 65816
@iOS_DevCenter said:
Original Tweet
52 hours is a long time to be down. If they could revert, they probably would have by now. That lends credibility to the suggestion that a serious bug was discovered.
I think we can write it off for this weekend at least. Sucks if you really needed it.
Rogifan
macrumors Penryn
Just curious...do Google and Amazon bring down websites for an extended period of time when performing maintenance?
HiRez
macrumors 603
For a few hours in the middle of the night, yes. And usually announced in advance, certainly where developers are concerned. I've never seen them offline for 2+ days, or even close to that. At this point I think it's safe to assume something Very Bad has happened and the complete silence from Apple about this is not encouraging.
What I don't understand is why they don't roll the servers back to before whatever incident started this. When something gets majorly horked, that's normally what you'd do, right? If you're coding a project and you completely screw the pooch, you restore a previous commit from GitHub and start over, seems like they should be able to do that. Unless the backup/restore system is also hosed...yikes.
What's odd is that iTunes Connect and Bug Reporter are still up and running. If it were some kind of security problem with developer account credentials, that would surely not be the case. So who knows, it's really mysterious at this point and getting weirder by the hour.
Unhyper
macrumors regular
Were this the case, I'd hope they would tell us so we could start changing all our passwords.
I'm genuinely surprised they don't have backups, racks, anything to push out. Even more surprised by the lack of an official statement.
Googled the topic, it has gained a lot of traffic, even on non tech related sites.
Googled the topic, it has gained a lot of traffic, even on non tech related sites.
Smith288
macrumors 65816
Apple's Developer Center Experiences Daylong Outage
The lack if any apple statement is alarming. With how Tim cook addressed the maps issue, I'd expect him to be a little more proactive to communicate.
The lack if any apple statement is alarming. With how Tim cook addressed the maps issue, I'd expect him to be a little more proactive to communicate.
Actually, I think it was on Monday, after logging in to dev portal I was prompted to change my password.
However, it said that my original had 'expired' or something like that, which is possible given I have this one for 3 years or so and Apple is quite strict about passwords (various charsets, no same password as in the past etc.).
So I guess it may be unrelated with this service outage, but nonetheless it happened.
SmoMo
macrumors regular
1 / 0
This makes me think that they have been hacked and they suspect that the exploit is part of the apple developer system. However they don't know how long they have been compromised and will not put the system back online until they can find and fix the exploit.
So building on this guesswork with more guessing, one vulnerability may be the calculation of the certificates , with the possibility of a math exception caused by maliciously constructed signing requests.
Worst case? The system has been compromised for some time, and the hackers were able to upload an App update for a popular App such as Facebook and are now in control of 100 million iOS device.
Best Case? They've added Clippy from MSWord to assist us with provisioning tasks.
This makes me think that they have been hacked and they suspect that the exploit is part of the apple developer system. However they don't know how long they have been compromised and will not put the system back online until they can find and fix the exploit.
So building on this guesswork with more guessing, one vulnerability may be the calculation of the certificates , with the possibility of a math exception caused by maliciously constructed signing requests.
Worst case? The system has been compromised for some time, and the hackers were able to upload an App update for a popular App such as Facebook and are now in control of 100 million iOS device.
Best Case? They've added Clippy from MSWord to assist us with provisioning tasks.
Smith288
macrumors 65816
Apple's Developer Center Experiences Daylong Outage
Hackers with access to apple's provision site have no capability to "hack" people's devices regardless how much them they had to mess around with ipa files. FB app is still walled off from the OS.
Easy on the freak outs. I'm guessing, with thousands of apps, restoring from a backup Db could take quite a while after its been determined a bug can't be patched. Who knows but some of these guesses are pretty ludicrous.
Hackers with access to apple's provision site have no capability to "hack" people's devices regardless how much them they had to mess around with ipa files. FB app is still walled off from the OS.
Easy on the freak outs. I'm guessing, with thousands of apps, restoring from a backup Db could take quite a while after its been determined a bug can't be patched. Who knows but some of these guesses are pretty ludicrous.
SmoMo
macrumors regular
Hackers with access to iTunes Connect can upload an App update which includes malicious code.
But as I said, worst case scenario right?