“Several Apple services, including iTunes and the App Store, suffered outages Wednesday that began around 5 a.m. ET and extended through midday,” Everett Rosenfeld reports for CNBC.
“Some users reported seeing connection errors throughout the early morning when attempting to either access apps or download new data through them,” Rosenfeld reports. “Bloomberg reported the outages were found in U.S., Switzerland, Spain, and the U.K.”
“‘We apologize to our customers experiencing problems with iTunes and other services this morning. The cause was an internal DNS error at Apple. We’re working to make all of the services available to customers as soon as possible, and we thank everyone for their patience,’ Apple said in a statement to CNBC,” Rosenfeld reports. “”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Oh, for the love of…
Related article:
Apple’s iTunes, app stores, iCloud services experience outages worldwide – March 11, 2015
Kind and thoughtful of them to apologize. 😘
Not enough because they did not explain “The cause was an internal DNS error at Apple” — why the hell there was that error? For each cause there is a cause. 😉
They don’t have to explain anything.
They do not have to, but they also do not necessarily have to apologize either. It would be interesting to know what came up, and what Apple will do so that it will not be repeated ever after.
Shit happens derss I’ve had many HDDs fail but i don’t expect an apology from the makers. Hardware and software are not perfect.
But Apple did apologise, so taking one more step with telling interesting information on the issue would not hurt at all.
I appreciate their apology but am left with the thought, “Who would store their business-critical documents in the cloud?’
Yet.
Yea. I have a client giving serious thought to Dropbox Business and storing 4TB of data since it is so cheap. I’ve tried to explain the negatives.
They are not listening.
I know what you mean.
Take fur-instance my trip to meet with the CEO of Apple the other day. I had a flat tyre. And I said, “Who would ever trust a car to get to a business meeting”.
/s
I trust it because all my data on DropBox and iCloud (this includes Mail & Calendar) are on both the cloud AND my hard drive (make that SSD) as well as my iPhone. – all automatically.
I also use a 3TB Apple Time Machine.
DNS is a critical system, and managing it takes great care, and even with the best of care, problems will occur and outages will happen to expect that there will be an issue is foolish. As more people place perhaps sensitive information into the cloud, they should still maintain local backups for their own protection. Possible Cyber attacks could also cause outages..
Not sure exactly what Apple’s down time stat is, 99%, 98% 99.8%, whatever, considering the number of people they service, I think they are doing pretty well.
How about apologizing for putting the iToi (Apple Swatch) app on every up to date iPhone. You can also take Newsstand, Stocks and Weather along with it. And Facebook integration.
Get a life, take 2 minutes and move what you don’t want into a folder and to the last page on your iPhone.. There are reasons Apple provides a core set of apps that they don’t want removed whether you want to use them or not.
And what good reason would that be?
If you don’t understand the concept of core services, then you’ll never get it.., go get a POS Android phone with far more crap then you’ll ever see on an iPhone and call it a day… How lame are you that you cannot merely move them out of the way and call it a day, instead of whining online..
It is not lame to not wish to have memory hogged with bullshit apps nobody wants or needs. Apple is just using it’s position to force this shit upon us.
As to core services- I have owned/used computers going back to the Apple ][, the TRS-80, the Commodore PET, and Sinclair. I learned BASIC on Apples way back in the day. From then until now I have used and been the SysAdmin for a laundry list of UNIX computers- desktop to workstation to minicomputer to …
Wangs, Data Generals, Digital Vax, SGI Workstations and much more.
I have been involved in securely sending and using highly sensitive data over networks since before the internet- using DoD’s private setups.
No, I would’t know anything about computers.
Apple could make the Watch app stand alone- they just do not want to.
What happens when you want it back and don’t know how to do so? What happens if you someone accidentally deletes it not knowing what it is. How do you software update something that doesn’t exist? Do you keep it hidden and then double QA resources to cover both hidden and un-hidden apps? What about bugs that could be introduced that could inadvertently hide apps? Do you show hidden apps after they are updated? What happens when you can’t find your Watch app? Call AppleCare? Cost Apple money? The apps are part of the operating system. Just like you can’t remove frameworks, you can’t remove core apps.
Any other reasons?
No need for it to be a core app.
It’s reassuring to know that it’s not just our small one man shops that have occasional “internal DNS errors”.
There may be a deeper issue here. It would seem that for as much time it took to solve the problem, if it was as simple as a DNS error, they spent an awful long time looking at something else. Which leads me to think there was something else.
What I am saying, it may have only been a DNS error, but they may have coincidentally uncovered something else. We may never know what it was, but I bet we should be thankful. Apple is the Holy Grail of all hacks, and apparently the NSA’s nose picking. Wouldn’t you think 8 hours justifies something intensely significant? Kind of “All Hands On Deck”
DNS servers are generally working copies of the master DNS server, for this reason, changes, including fixes, take time to propagate from the main server to all the copies. The outage was well within the time it would take to diagnose, remedy and propagation a normal DNS error.
Good to know.
What I don’t get is that I was unable to share from my computer to my apple tv in Australia, being given an “error 5599”. Surely approval on an internal system needn’t have to go through Apple every time?
Turning on sharing required authentication of your Apple ID password. That takes a connection to a remote server. The DNS error prevented that connection from happening.
The CIA compromises Apple.
Research it.
till out as I am typing this (3:39pm central time)
o is your key.
CIA infects Apple’s iTunes DNS servers routing traffic to God knows where so they can log iTunes user names and account log-ins.
Then they use that info to push compromised updates to Apple users.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/10/ispy-cia-campaign-steal-apples-secrets
Tin foil hats not needed.
Interesting link. Let’s not give Lockheed Martin too much credit for ingenuity however as they are responsible for the F35 boondoggle.
All services back up.😀
Cmon Apple. You should have multiple redundant DNS servers. Jeez.