Last week, Apple apps faced disruptions for more than 3 hours as Apple had a widespread cloud outage. Apple’s system status page indicates it had about a three-hour outage which affected the App Store, Apple Books, Apple ID, Apple Music, Apple Music Subscriptions, Apple Online Store, Apple Pay, Apple TV, the Apple device enrollment service, and more. Users couldn’t even use Find My iPhone to locate their devices.
Past events have reminded the world that wholesale cloud resiliency fails sometimes and at that time every hour and minute counts, especially when an individual needs to authenticate an online service.
In the past, Apple’s outage resulted in catastrophic failures affecting Google cloud customers, leading to disruptions and an outage and availability problems across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp.
ThousandEyes, a US-based network monitoring startup, posted a good explanation on the outages saying Cloudflare’s outage was due to Verizon BGP Internet-routing blunder. Due to ‘BGO route flap’ Apple’s cloud was collapsed and the issue leads to the loss of severe packet for users in North America.
Reminder to iPhone users
This issue of Apple’s outage gave iPhone users a gentle reminder of their dependency on Apple’s cloud which affects their ability to sign in to apps, buy stuff online, pay to check out, carry out work and use their paid-for their favorite music subscription.
Explanation to customers
Google and Cloudflare came up with a detailed explanation to customers as to what went wrong with the recent spate of cloud outages. Similarly, Facebook apologized for the issue and explained that routine maintenance operation has triggered this issue and that was the only reason which prevented users from sending videos and photos.
Microsoft also possesses its share of cloud outages that have prevented the businesses from using DevOps, Dynamics, Azure and Microsoft 365. In the past, they have blocked customers from authenticating its core cloud services and products.
