Want to know how much website downtime costs, and the impact it can have on your business?
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021



We all know and associate Apple as a reliable and innovative tech giant which sets endless new trends for its industry. It’s arguably the one company that many aspire to be like and emulate with the massive global growth they’ve seen over the past decade. But even this goliath tech company has its bad days and unfortunately for Apple, it had a whole week of bad luck that tested the patience of its customers across the world.
The week beginning the 21st of March is a week that Apple would like to forget after suffering 2 different outages to its services. With the reputation Apple has we would have never thought or expected them to have had such an issue with their servers.
The first outage on Monday the 21st of March affected millions of Apple users as the Apple Music, Apple Maps, iCloud, iCloud Calendar, iCloud Contacts, iCloud Mail, iCloud Private Relay, iTunes Store, Radio, Podcasts, the App Store, iMessage, and Apple TV+. which practically means every Apple device would have been affected and pretty much everyone that uses an Apple service. The bad luck did not stop there either; the issues also extended to Apple’s corporate side as well as affecting their retail system practically pausing the company which undoubtedly was very costly to them.
The reason for the issue was identified as a Domain Name issue which you would think Apple would have picked up on or sorted out way before it got to a global outage. However, Apple did not go into any detail about why this issue occurred. The next day it identified that Apple’s Mac App Store, Apple Card, Apple Books, iCloud Web Apps, and Weather stopped working. In essence, what this Domain Name Issue caused was a complete outage for Apple and the service it provides to its customers. Once the issue was identified it was dealt with really quickly by Apple which was praised by its millions of customers.
A couple of days later on the 24th of March, there were more issues for Apple, this time affecting messenger and it was identified as a server issue. What was strange about this incident is that it was not reported on Apple’s status page, so it’s either Apple did not want to inform their customers as it would be quick to fix or worst they didn’t even realise until someone mentioned the issue. There was some speculation that it might be because Apple is now creating its own cloud storage server system and are slowly moving services over its server. Apple is investing heavily in this service and has also announced it will be spending over $1.5 billion on AWS in the next few years which shows the increase in demand for its services. Simultaneously it is also creating its own servers centres and soon is expecting to finish its Danish Data centre.
This upgrade will be needed by Apple as they are also adding additional services to its current business offering with Apple Pay as its introduction to the financial world but now there is speculation that Apple is dipping its toes in the advertising segment as it sees this as a potential growth area. By doing this it will now compete with Meta, Google and Amazon the other tech giants in this segment.
Share this
3 min read In the previous posts, we’ve looked at how alert noise emerges from design decisions, why notification lists fail to create accountability, and why alerts only work when they’re designed around a clear outcome. Taken together, these ideas point to a broader conclusion. That alerting is not just a technical system, it’s a socio-technical one. Alerting
3 min read In the first two posts of this series, we explored how alert noise emerges from design decisions, and why notification lists fail to create accountability when responsibility is unclear. There’s a deeper issue underneath both of those problems. Many alerting systems are designed without being clear about the outcome they’re meant to produce. When teams
3 min read In the previous post, we looked at how alert noise is rarely accidental. It’s usually the result of sensible decisions layered over time, until responsibility becomes diffuse and response slows. One of the most persistent assumptions behind this pattern is simple. If enough people are notified, someone will take responsibility. After more than fourteen years
3 min read In a previous post, The Incident Checklist: Reducing Cognitive Load When It Matters Most, we explored how incidents stop being purely technical problems and become human ones. These are moments where decision-making under pressure and cognitive load matter more than perfect root cause analysis. When systems don’t support people clearly in those moments, teams compensate.
4 min read In the previous post, we looked at what happens after detection; when incidents stop being purely technical problems and become human ones, with cognitive load as the real constraint. This post assumes that context. The question here is simpler and more practical. What actually helps teams think clearly and act well once things are already
3 min read In the previous post, we explored how AI accelerates delivery and compresses the time between change and user impact. As velocity increases, knowing that something has gone wrong before users do becomes a critical capability. But detection is only the beginning. Once alerts fire and dashboards light up, humans still have to interpret what’s happening,
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021