Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Apple's iPhone Activation Servers Experiencing Extended Outage

Steve.P.JobsFan said:
It's technology. Technology is known to occasionally have a problem and occasionally break.

As long as they get it running again within a reasonable amount of time, there is nothing "outrageous" about this. Relax! 🙂
Click to expand...


It's been a week. that's too long in the tech world.
 
The real problem here is that an expensive device that you OWN requires "activation" at all

It's effectively getting permission from Apple to let you use it

What happens when Apple does not or cannot run these servers for a particular device is not yet known...
 
Gurubarry said:
Thank goodness for those reassuring words...thought my $500 was for a phone service ...mdr
Click to expand...

If you have your receipt, take it back to the store, and trade it in for an Android. That way you can exchange your few hours of inconvenience for two years of mediocre, kludgy phone usage.

Problem solved.
 
Daveoc64 said:
The real problem here is that an expensive device that you OWN requires "activation" at all

It's effectively getting permission from Apple to let you use it

What happens when Apple does not or cannot run these servers for a particular device is not yet known...
Click to expand...


I have been asking this myself for years. Purchased full price or not everybody will end up paying the full price eventually and that's a contract between you and the service provider.

What would people say if they have to "activate" their toasters before they could use it 🙂
 
A friend of mine that I had running iOS 7 for me through my developer account to test some things, especially since it was on an iPhone 4 and not the 5 I currently am running it on.

A couple of days ago (this was still after the initial developer outage) he drove to my house and somehow the phone deactivated itself with no external input from either of us or anything else that I know of. I tried fruitlessly probably 10-15 times to get it to reactivate but it just refused to do it. Fortunately, I was able to restore his phone to 6.1.3 just fine and he luckily had a fairly recent iOS 6 compatible backup on iCloud that I loaded onto it right then. It had no trouble activating iOS 6, but 7 was just not happening at the time. I'm betting something related to this hack/outage/whatever was the cause of this issue.
 
MacMan1620 said:
They should call this website macTrolling. The comments on here are ridiculous. It's a temporary server issue. Get over it people.
Click to expand...

"A" server issue? Really? So the multiple billion $$ Apple has "A" server that has failed. (probably the one hard drive that was in it). Yes crap happens I get that (I am in IT and have been for 25+ yrs). However these days redundancy is more important that ever. There is no excuse for a multibillion$ company like Apple with multiple datacenters all over the place to be down totally. Especially for activations. Not to mention a week long outage of the developer site. With the resources they have there is simply no excuse. Sure an outage is possible and understandable, but it should be resolved swiftly not in days and weeks. I never had that luxury at the small business I worked for. If we were down it there was no way a week could pass and my answer would be "Well things happen relax people"
 
sbailey4 said:
"A" server issue? Really? So the multiple billion $$ Apple has "A" server that has failed. (probably the one hard drive that was in it). Yes crap happens I get that (I am in IT and have been for 25+ yrs). However these days redundancy is more important that ever. There is no excuse for a multibillion$ company like Apple with multiple datacenters all over the place to be down totally. Especially for activations. Not to mention a week long outage of the developer site. With the resources they have there is simply no excuse. Sure an outage is possible and understandable, but it should be resolved swiftly not in days and weeks. I never had that luxury at the small business I worked for. If we were down it there was no way a week could pass and my answer would be "Well things happen relax people"
Click to expand...
A server issue usually doesn't mean something that applies to an individual server, it means more of a server-side issue of some sort.
 
C DM said:
A server issue usually doesn't mean something that applies to an individual server, it means more of a server-side issue of some sort.
Click to expand...

Yes I get it. That was a sarcastic remark. Point being Apple has the most resources available than probably any tech company in the world. If the entire datacenter in NC went offline with the thousands of servers in there, there should be a redundant datacenter that could be rerouted to. Especially for activations. Redundant everything? Probably not but certain things like activations for new devices or folks restoring a jacked up device, yes. Again I am more looking at the developer portal issue that's been a week. Man that's an eternity in the tech world, just sayin.

And to the folks with the "relax it will be ok", sure it will. (Love the video BTW so true it is) But the reality is Apple is better than that (or used to be).
 
Does anyone know what activation actually does? I'm not familiar with the "inner workings" of iOS so can someone please explain why it'd need to talk to Apple in the first place?
 
macfacts said:
why do iPhones even have to be activated? With my Galaxy Note 2, I just bought it full price and just inserted my sim card. No need to ask permission to use what I just bought.
Click to expand...

You could, but what happens if you lose your phone and can't use certain features as Find my iPhone, make a backup from an older saved data file, stream your music from the cloud, etc.....
 
this is the problem.. your device is not yours until apple say so.. imagine the frustration you buy / restore your iphone and you can't use it for i don't know how long ??
 
This would explain why I couldn't activate my mom's iPhone 4 this morning and unlocking it with ATT. Here I thought the unlocking process went haywire.
 
This is a very big deal.

Further the MacRumors article has not been updated to reflect the resolution.
 
Last edited:
War

IMO, we are witnessing a coordinated attack on Apple Systems with large resources. An attempt to embarrass Apple, slow down iPhone growth, delay iOS7 as much as possible.

Expect more. Funding probably from S. Korea. 😉
 
Dang, I'm no dev and I don't have an iPhone that needs to be reactivated, but all these outages nowadays, would seriously piss me off for a phone that expensive. Seriously, a phone that is priced over 900 € (for the 64GB iPhone 5), you can not be happy about this.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back