Why is the Apple Mac Developer portal down, and for how long?

These things (major incidents) can happen to any company and Apple is no exception. It's obvious that this incident is related to (very) core systems of the developer portal and not just for some of the front end systems.

A 'major incident' is when an interstate is closed down....the dev portal and the betas are just side streets. Resist the urge to make this into something it's not 🙂.

Again, those resources are contracted/outsourced (Google JIVE Software). Lowest bidder....least effort. The number of days they've been unavailable makes it clear how important and kept up they are. Or are not, in this case.

I just sent Apple an email informing them that the developer site was down.

Maybe they weren't aware.....

So if it goes up in the next ten minutes you can thank me..... (I am talking about the site of course)

K T wrote:

Are your existing apps still in the store?

I've written two apps that are on the store. "iMarch" & "DotBook". Both are still listed on the store, but if I try to download them, I just get a message "This item is temporarily unavailable". Again, my account was set to expire on July 19, but Apple claimed that they had extended our expiration dates and kept the apps on the store if we were planning to renew during this outage. I'm kind of confused :/

The only said your apps would be in the store....they never claimed anyone could actually get them 😟

As part of the extension notice, they add "If you have any other concerns about your account, please contact us."

Did you use the link & do that?

I am begining to suspect Monday may not see a new shiny site. A data center is usually a disributed affair where no one disk or even a dozen disks would much risk a data loss. If they did it right. Losing track of app certificates, for instance, could bring down all their and the developer's sales either immediately or eventually.

It's easy to wonder if there was a security breech. The fact that internal sites went visible for a while is a little disconcerting. How can something as basic as domain resolution internally get that pooched for a site upgrade?

Also it's easy to speculate that, given the wretched nature of their documentation (I usually find better information with Google searches beyond just a listing of functions and properties supplied by their site, or indeed most of their explanitory documentation), disjoint handling of the several pieces necessary to develop, test and distribute and app, along with the rather crappy and slip shod nature of Xcode itself (no I am not a fan of it), they might have 'knifed the baby' and finally tried to fix it all up. And/or ios7 requires a giant massaging of all existing apps, which is taking much longer than they expected.

And/or there is something else they are doing that's a 'suprise' new-new thing and we will all be bowled over in delight come Monday.

How can something as basic as domain resolution internally get that pooched for a site upgrade?

Easy as pie when the domain certs aren't renewed and let loose in the wild.*

Remember this has happpened to Apple (and Google and....) in the past, so it is entirely possible this is part of a repeat.

And keep in mind that Apple is one of the major tech firms that has to take things down just for upgrades, when the rest of the modern world has figured out how to do all that in place. But when you rely on 3rd party vendors for your stuff, there isn't much you can do but act like everything is ok in the mean time.

* Problem is, if it was a scheduled upgrade with associated down time, they would have issued a notice the dev community ahead of time...and it wouldn't have been down so long. There was no notice, it is taking a long time - this has nothing to do with any planned/botched upgrade.

As part of the extension notice, they add "If you have any other concerns about your account, please contact us."

Did you use the link & do that?

Just sent them an email using the link on the maintenance page. Hope for the best.

Hrrmmmm... Not looking promising for Apple to get their act together and get things working again...

The Original post was made on Thursday, 18th July at 9:15

The latest (above post) was made at 21st July at 14:30

Now assuming that the outage occured and Douglas noticed it immediately, Thats 3.5 days the Developer portal has been down.

Sorry apple, 3 and a half days later is not considered "Scheduled Maintenance" by most normal people, thats considered a serious problem.

My local time (Sydney Australai) is Monday 22nd July, at 7:30am.

The portal is STILL down, and I REALLY need to generate new deployment certs to deploy our in house app to a new employee.

Can we get SOME sort of ETA as to when things will be up ?

There was at least one thread an hour before this one started, so...yeah, we're into the 4th day.

You might want to ping:

Ernest Prabhakar <prabhaka@apple.com>

Developer Forums Evangelist

Apple, Inc.

Good luck in any case.

9To5Mac is reporting that developers with expiring accounts are receiving an email granting them a 1 week extension to their account.

Well if you are a developer you can check your email and you should see a message from Apple. At least we have been given a reason for the downtime.

Well.. Now we know why the portal has been down.

Had to happen some time. I was surprised it didn't happen earlier.

Just got this in my email.

Apple Developer Website Update

Last Thursday, an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers from our developer website. Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed, however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed. In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you of the issue. We took the site down immediately on Thursday and have been working around the clock since then.

In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database. We apologize for the significant inconvenience that our downtime has caused you and we expect to have the developer website up again soon.

That is bad news. Hope they have it up really soon, I've been waiting 4 days now to get access