Several Apple Services are Experiencing Outages (opens in new tab)

At the risk of a more glib comment than I usually try to make:

Having had my systems variously backhoed, struck by lightning, physically unplugged (backup and primary) by a sysadmin (cough who may have on another occasion been me not properly counting the rack I was on cough), and left without mains power for multiple weeks after an electrical fire in a substation, an outage is indeed something that can sneak up on you despite best intentions.

(yes yes "distribute" "build for failure" "it's apple we should expect more" are all valid answers, but wanted to make a tongue in cheek response to your wording.)

I disagree. "Experiencing outages" means something more than any of the other phrases you used. It's also more professional.

"are down" doesn't tell you whether it's intentional or not (whereas "outages" is a word that people don't use for expected downtime). "are having problems" and "are not working" don't even tell you anything about the symptoms. But "experiencing outages" means the service is partially or completely interrupted, and that it wasn't expected downtime.

Arguably the other phrases overcommit though - Are they down? Are they up but giving bad data/intermittent? Are they up but there is a problem between the server and user? Are they up in some regions but down in others? are all covered by experiencing outages, but "are down"/"are not working" are more definitive, both in that the service is definitely not working and that the problem is definitely on Apple's end.

"Are down" can also suggest that the downtime was deliberate.

You're being downvoted, but I agree.

This reminds me of the system level UIAlertView's that used to pop up regarding iCloud, at seemingly random times.

I'm glad Apple re-worked that flow, but it sounds like several types of (previously) rarely occurring errors trigger similar behavior.

Agreed. Nobody in my office is having issues, but I know one guy whose cowork space is full of pop-ups on their computers, complaining over and over again about not being able to access iTunes or something -- when they're not actively trying to use any service. I'm guessing maybe that cowork space NATs out as the same IP which is why all workers in one office would have issues but I haven't heard of these issues in my own office or other friends' workplaces.

Hopefully this fiasco teaches them a little about being less obtrusive with such messages. In the past, it likely could be chalked up to a user misconfiguration, so they can blame a PEBKAC issue and push it on the user. When the failure is on Apple's end, and it affects many users at once, they'll hear pretty loud and clear that these need to go away.

> At what point does the OS need to get out of the way and stop trying to earn money but just let the user use it?

~45 online services, and most of them are free. Extra cloud storage and third party content are the only things you pay for.

may be complete coincidence, but about 8-9hrs ago my friend's iphone started acting up; emails vanishing while they were reading them, sub-routes in apps silently failing back to main screen...

even if this is unrelated - disconcerting to hear that the unit's usability is so closely tied to online services

Regardless if there is an issue with Apple Services or not, there was also an issue with your phone and TV. No phone or TV should ever do that, regardless of the state of Apple web services.