
Apple iCloud Experiencing Issues - josho
https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/
======
Meekro
For those out of the loop, this week has seen an outage from a bunch of major
US internet companies: Cloudflare, Slack, Google Cloud, Azure, Facebook
(including Instagram and WhatsApp), and now iCloud.

~~~
mcqueenjordan
Interns join at the beginning of summer. \o/

~~~
saagarjha
Now might be around the time they’d start pushing to production, too…

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pilif
After reading the ZIP bomb article also linked on HN, I have copied the
largest file to my iCloud drive for fun.

And an hour later, I'm reading that most of iCloud is down. I really hope this
is a funny coincidence. And if not, then I'm terribly sorry.

~~~
your_bully
Don't give yourself too much credit

~~~
wybiral
Hey, at least it's as likely as some of the weird conspiracy theories being
floated around.

~~~
walrus01
Maybe somebody copied the zip bomb onto the battery charge controller
subsystem of the russian submarine cable tapping submarine.

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envolt
I'm going to read all the conspiracy theories on this post.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20345060](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20345060)
(Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages)

~~~
3JPLW
You know the old adage that celebrities die in threes? It's actually
mathematically supported... or, well, it's supported that they die in 2.718s.
Same principle would apply to cloud service outages if all the services and
their failures were actually independent. We'd expect them to happen in
"clusters" of e:

[http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/celebrities.html](http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/celebrities.html)

I still love me a good conspiracy theory, but clustering of random (poisson)
events is much more likely than you'd expect.

~~~
api
Facebook, Google, Apple, Cloudflare, Azure, Amazon, WhatsApp, and we have
noticed smaller bits of routing weirdness like servers in Los Angeles not
being able to hit GitHub for a few hours a few days ago.

This is more like 6-8, not e. It's definitely odd.

One non-conspiracy explanation I can imagine is that maybe all these big
providers have a bunch of hidden dependencies on each other.

~~~
the-dude
But the outages are sequential, not simultaneous

~~~
api
They are very dense compared to the usual rate.

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johnnycab
Just wondering out aloud rather than floating any theories, if it is in any
way related to the 6.4 magnitude earthquake and/or geological events leading
upto it. Also inter/un-related, Google provides Apple with the infrastructure
for iCloud; they also experienced some downtime in the last few days, along
with others i.e. tremors causing _some_ sensitive/critical servers to
misbehave.

However, I doubt that it is down to these factors, as there will likely be
significant amount of distributed fault tolerance, failover and contingency
plans in place.

[https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ci38443183...](https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ci38443183/executive)

~~~
luckydata
It's definitely the end times. Locusts coming anytime now.

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pcora
So, when is Amazon / AWS outage day? Tomorrow?

~~~
mehrshad
If there's any credibility behind the notion of these being deliberate in any
way, I'd wager July 15/16.

~~~
wybiral
Why those specific days?

~~~
tdurden
Amazon Prime Day(s)

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samcday
I'd like to think the simplest explanation to this recent spate of outages is
that all the engineers at each org spent too long reading the HN comment
thread on the previous company's outage, and didn't notice their own servers
catching fire ;)

~~~
ryanmarsh
Imagine all the ops folks gloating earlier in the week ( _cough_ CloudFlare)
having to eat crow mere days later.

~~~
Gigablah
All the ops folks I know wouldn’t gloat at something like that. They’ve been
through it themselves.

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SpaceManNabs
Imagine being on call this week. My best wishes to anyone doing DevOps or Ops.

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ohnope
Any internet engineers privy to what's going on the last few days, at a global
infrastructure level?

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ok_coo
Senior people at the orgs are starting to go on summer vacation. ;)

~~~
dylan604
Wait, isn't it when the senior people leave that real work gets done?

~~~
delfinom
No, that's when managers and bosses leave.

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kemals
Here is how ThousandEyes viewed the impact:
[https://twitter.com/thousandeyes/status/1146862826566250499](https://twitter.com/thousandeyes/status/1146862826566250499)

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DavideNL
Little off-topic, but lately i often find myself Airdropping files between my
iPad & Macbook because iCloud isn't syncing newly added files for some reason
(which can't be forced/refreshed on the iPad as far as i know.)

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snazz
Are there any graphs anywhere showing Internet traffic at different ISPs and
networks? Such a graph (especially over a world map) would make it obvious if
there was any DDoS, SSH bruteforcing, or other monkey business going on.

~~~
photonios
ThousandEyes does this.

[https://twitter.com/thousandeyes/status/1146862826566250499](https://twitter.com/thousandeyes/status/1146862826566250499)

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ceejayoz
I wish there was a historical view. Very curious if this is common, or if it's
unusual (which would make it _especially_ unusual with the Slack, Facebook,
etc. outages recently).

~~~
tedmiston
The page is on archive.org if you want to write a script to cobble together
some historical data.

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jaredcwhite
I'm actually relieved to hear there were a bunch of known problems…earlier
today I was wondering why none of my notes and photos were syncing and thought
iCloud was loosing its marbles. It used to happen a lot to me, but in the last
year or so it's been pretty stable. I was afraid sync reliability was
regressing!

I suspect Apple's making upgrades as part of the push towards iOS 13 and macOS
Catalina, and ran into some rollout glitches.

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thekyle
One of the services listed is Screen Time. Maybe I'm mistaken but isn't that
the feature on iPhones where you can see how much time you spend in each app?
Why would that require Apple's servers.

~~~
dmix
It labels what you're doing during that time, ie, which apps you're using then
displays an icon next to it which _could_ explain the web requests since there
are so many apps.

My guess is that it's a glorified analytics system for Apple which they
retooled into a useful service for end users.

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3xblah
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_day_(computing)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_day_\(computing\))

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kburman
In India, I'm experiencing issues with online payment from last few days.
Majorly with UPI payments. Not sure if these are related but hard to ignore
it.

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fc_barnes
I was noticing some issues with mega sync earlier, maybe these orgs are
sharing infrastructure at some level... I guess I won't rage quit just yet

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jwr
And I've been wondering why my kid could play games so long today, in spite of
Screen Time limits :-) I guess that explains it.

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mlosapio
iOS Walkie Talkie has been down since Wednesday

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rahuldottech
Holy crap this has been a turbulent couple weeks for internet companies and
services, eh?

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kache_
These things are so much more painful to deal with when it's July 4th.

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dmitriid
Tinfoil hat on, conspiracy mode on: And a fire on a Russian submarine whose
purpose is said to be disrupting communications (it can access and cut
underwater cables”.

~~~
Raphmedia
Is it that much of an internet conspiracy theory when mainstream media reports
on it?

[https://futurism.com/russian-sub-fire-internet-
cables](https://futurism.com/russian-sub-fire-internet-cables)

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/02/russian_sub_disaste...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/02/russian_sub_disaster/)

[https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-submarine-losharik-
un...](https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-submarine-losharik-undersea-
cables-media-speculation-2019-7)

Etc.

What I find interesting is that before big news networks covered it some HN
users were linking to the story in the previous outage threads. Way before
anyone knew that the submarine had cable cutting capabilities

At the time, everyone downvoted them because of how unrelated it seemed.

I'm not saying that I subscribe to the theory. But it is interesting
nonetheless.

~~~
reaperducer
_Is it that much of an internet conspiracy theory when mainstream media
reports on it?

[https://futurism.com/..](https://futurism.com/..).

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/..](https://www.theregister.co.uk/..).

[https://www.businessinsider.com/..](https://www.businessinsider.com/..). _

Still waiting for some "mainstream media" links.

~~~
Raphmedia
I sent the first three that I saw. I have to admit that in my eyes all those
sites have the same lack of credibility. Here's a few more mainstream, I
think.

"Analysts suggested that one of its possible missions could be disrupting
communication cables on the seabed." [https://time.com/5619197/russia-navy-
submarine-fire-deaths/](https://time.com/5619197/russia-navy-submarine-fire-
deaths/)

"Western military experts have suggested it is capable of probing and possibly
even severing undersea communications cables."
[https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/putin-russia-submarine-fire-
nu...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/putin-russia-submarine-fire-
nuclear-1.5199485)

"Analysts suggested that one of its possible missions could be disrupting
communication cables on the ocean bed."
[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/02/sailors-killed-in-russia-
sub...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/02/sailors-killed-in-russia-submersible-
fire-ministry.html)

"Russian ships may be using underwater cables to spy"
[https://nypost.com/2018/03/30/russian-ships-may-be-using-
und...](https://nypost.com/2018/03/30/russian-ships-may-be-using-underwater-
cables-to-spy/)

etc.

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sys_64738
What happened to 5 nines uptime?

