Apple outages: A week Apple would like to forget

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.

What happened to Apple?

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.

Apple’s outages explained

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. 

What caused Apple’s outages?

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.

Another Apple outage

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.