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

I feel more or less like patrick does, but I would rather apple fix this vulnarabilities for good rather than putting a quick-fix version of the dev portal out.

I too am approaching a deadline and in need of the dev protal badly, but I guess apple is doing what needs to be done. This is what Sony should have done when PSN was hacked. But I hope they can get the portal up and running soon. So many peoples livelyhood depends on it.

QUESTION

Is there any other way to register an iOS device UDID and link it up with an already exsiting provisioning profile (instead of using the web portal). I need to add sevaral testers to my current test version from testflight, but unable to build the app with new testers UDIDs since dev portal is down?.

ANSWER: No.

I made a call to Apple Support yesterday. I was trying to get to the bottom of if the required maintenance is 9% or 90% complete. I'm in the middle of trying to get an ad-hoc build to beta testers and of course I'm paralyzed because of the downtime. I'm blown a mission critical deadline and I have a client screaming at me trying to find out what's going on.

Absolutely nobody i chatted to at Apple Developer Support had any idea of how long this will take. Nor would anyone elaborate what "Back Soon" actually meant in terms of time.

My suggestion to Apple is please communicate better with your customers. At the very least change the "Back Soon" message on the web portal with some kind of update as to how things are going. That message hasn't changed in over 3 days.

I understand that the company screwed up in terms of securing data and there were perhaps many elements that are outside of it's control. That's the nature of the software (and indeed hardware) business. But they are in control of how they communicate and update people on what's going on... and in that department this situation is a miserable failure for them.

Apple seems to be so much in love with themselves and their own products it's forgotten that it needs happy customers.

Instead of waiting for anything to happen:

* refactor

* document

* research

* update manuals

* create product vid

* add a feature

* contact your customers it is out of control

* pay some attention to your family or friends

* prepare for next release

* make that backup, or test your contingency plan

* clean up desk and/or harddrive

* play a game

* visit physical apple store and meet new geeks

* learn how to make mayonaise (hey get away from my keyboard)

* install a password manager

* clean out your wardrobe

* look at cats on the internet

* experiment with wolframalpha

Etc.

[S] Enter: Day 7

This is a much bigger issue for Enterprise customers than people are realizing. We need to renew our cert and resign dozens of applications (this is a yearly process). Once that is done, we need to distribute the updates to thousands of devices and Apple only gives us 30 days to do that before our old cert expires. This process requires planning and we need to give our users an appropriate amount of time to update their apps. Taking a week out of this process requires significant changes to our plans and if we are down for more than 30 days, we're dead in the water. All of our apps (some of which are critical) will stop working. Apple needs to be more transparent so enterprise customers can plan accordingly.

//edit: spelling

I seriously doubt if Ibrahim Balic is the person behind the outage. The leak that he shows in his video, even if it is genuine, shouldn't take a a week? a month? to close. And he only retrieved data, if at all, he didn't modify any data. And if passwords were exposed, this should have affected many more sites and systems, not just the developers' members portal.

I wonder if we'll ever know.

My personal take (which means absoultely nothing...)

They shut down the system becasue of Balic as a safety precaution.

And the 'backup system' didn't quite work out as planned.

And now the problem is trying to restore all the data

Zerone_V wrote:

Saying that, I think the biggest gripe with developers here is that we "feel" like we have no control over what is going on here.

There is very little factual information, just a lot of heresay from various news sources.

Some say the iAD network was hacked, some say development certs were downloaded and possibly compromised, some say only developer usernames and possibly hashed passwords were accessed.

Do you have a source or web url that states that the dev certs might have been downloaded? Where I work IT Security is going ape **** over this and if there is even the remote possibility that this might have happened then they need to know about it. Even if that is posted on some no one's blog then I still need to take a look at it. We are already considering all certs to be dead and will generated new ones as soon as we get access to the portal. But if this is actually true then I do need to report it.

Some reading material while we wait: http://bit.ly/1bgzqL3

"For now, all developers can do is continue to wait."

Apple is getting an object lesson in the dire problem of a single point of failure.

A week, and it will probably drift out to two weeks, suggests something much more than just patching holes, rather it suggests giant design and dependency flaws. They will get them fixed. I can't imagine any of their issues haven't been solved elsewhere already. The problem is, probably, they can't avail themselves of well tested and developed systems, because they've coasted along on some cheap internal hack of theirs. The term critical mass comes to mind.

Ugh... Im so sick of experimenting with Wolfram Alpha and looking at cat pictures.

iOS is a dying breed anyway, maybe while they are fixing this hunk of junk they should check how much more Android has dominated market share in the last 7 days???

Oh puh-leaze. Your comment is ridiculous.

Go troll elsewhere.

I've unsubscribed to this thread because of the trolls that are posting here. If you look at the profiles of the posters who are doing the most complaining; the ones talking about lawsuits or how long they are waiting (since Thursday as we all know) you'll see they joined the forum within the down period. Don't feed the trolls.

I hope this is not a trend on Apple's Support forums. If trolls are in the other sections of the forum as well then perhaps something needs to be done to make sure that only actual customers post here.