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iCloud Private Relay Down for Some Users

Huh. Well, it says it’s back, but there are some weird things going on. With PR enabled, some sites won’t load at all, and some won’t load images.

How strange.
 
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zorinlynx said:
This is one of those features that I'm glad is available in case I have to use a dodgy untrusted network, but would never leave on all the time. It just makes routing less efficient and adds latency to everything.

Many large services on the Internet have servers distributed around the world so that you're talking to a system close to you network-wise. The Google servers you're using might be in the downtown of the city you're in, for example. iCloud Private Relay ruins this efficiency because now your traffic might be relayed through god-knows-where before it goes to the service you're using.
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Less than you might think. Many large services do indeed use distributed systems through content delivery networks and points of presence around the world.

Those services are operated by CDN companies like Cloudflare, Akamai, and Fastly.

Who are Apple's egress/exit providers for Private Relay? Those very same companies. https://www.techradar.com/news/what-is-apple-private-relay-and-is-it-worse-than-a-vpn

It's a brand new technology developed by Apple, Cloudflare and [URL='https://www.techradar.com/reviews/fastly']Fastly[/URL], another big CDN provider who would make a lot of sense as a Private Relay partner. A recently published report speculates that [URL='https://www.techradar.com/news/akamais-page-integrity-manager-tackles-security-threats-from-within-your-browser']Akamai[/URL] is Apple's third provider, and suggests the Private Relay link is behind a rally in the share prices for all three companies.
 
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I am all of a sudden getting "Your network preferences prevent content from loading privately" in any email that has content to load. Just started an hour ago? This must have something to do with this issue?
 
You won’t notice any delay. It uses QUIC for reduced latency and HTTP/3 and near proximity localized servers are configurable.
 
lysingur said:
Do you mind doing a speed test?

I read a lot of people saying it slows down their internet speed but I hardly feel it at all. The only thing that slows it is the hundreds of tabs that I have open.

Could it be the user's location? If Privacy Relay is similar to VPN, then that makes sense. The speed of VPN servers varies depending on your proximity to them.
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Will have to agree....for the most part I've not noticed any speed diff either. 2017MBP using Safari.
 
It totally screwed up my Safari on both my iPad and iPhone. Nothing would load and it didn’t matter if I turned it off or quit Safari completely, no sites would load. A restart helped and then I got the error message. Not fun but I guess it should be expected from beta. I think I’ll have to reconsider having it on until it is out of beta. Quite a lot of work to restart everything.
 
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Not touching this until out of beta. Any idea how long it will stay in beta for? For some reason I’m expecting until ios16 ?
 
Unsupported said:
I wonder if we'll see a Notification when it's back up ?
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Yes, I have seen such Notifications in the past. There are times when I connect to a network in which the Private Relay doesn’t work and it’ll also notify me when it can re-enable itself. Now, whether one gets these notifications consistently, I don’t know.
 
tennisproha said:
There’s a charge for Private Relay? I thought it was included with a pair iCloud account.
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It‘s included with an iCloud account that you pay for. i.e. for iCloud storage beyond the measly free 5GB.
 
Apple needs to solve their reliability problem. Moving to software as a service but still have frequent down times.
 
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zorinlynx said:
This is one of those features that I'm glad is available in case I have to use a dodgy untrusted network, but would never leave on all the time. It just makes routing less efficient and adds latency to everything.

Many large services on the Internet have servers distributed around the world so that you're talking to a system close to you network-wise. The Google servers you're using might be in the downtown of the city you're in, for example. iCloud Private Relay ruins this efficiency because now your traffic might be relayed through god-knows-where before it goes to the service you're using.
Click to expand...
I leave it on all the time.

The most appealing feature is it even encrypt DNS requests leaving Safari, hence my office admin would not know what websites I have been visiting when my phone is connected to the office Wi-Fi.
 
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