Apple Services Experiencing Outage
Key topics
As Apple Services experienced a rare outage, users were quick to chime in, with some expressing surprise that the tech giant wasn't immune to service disruptions. Commenters pointed out that Apple's reliance on Google Cloud for some services might be a factor, while others noted that the outage's impact varied depending on the region, with some users running on Apple's own data centers. The discussion also touched on Apple's revenue streams, with one user breaking down the company's service revenue into commissions, Google search default payments, and other services. Despite the outage, some users joked that the relatively low number of complaints on downdetector.com was "a new record" – sparking a lighthearted debate about the outage's severity.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
15m
Peak period
60
0-12h
Avg / period
11.3
Based on 68 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Dec 10, 2025 at 3:47 PM EST
about 1 month ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Dec 10, 2025 at 4:01 PM EST
15m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
60 comments in 0-12h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Dec 17, 2025 at 3:59 PM EST
24 days ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
2. A lot of their services have less criticality (and it's not a ding at them - it's often very explicit design choice).
3. App store having hiccups or iCloud backups being delayed it's not something that will usually gather enough attention of media.
If you live in a region where they operate their own data centers, you will be running on Apple data centers. If not, you're running on a mix of Google Cloud and AWS (IIRC). They used to use Azure as well, but I think that's no longer the case.
In any case, your data is encrypted (by Apple) before being uploaded to Google or AWS, and only Apple has that key. Whatever E2EE encryption you use will be applied on top of that.
I live near the Danish Apple data center, and pretty much all my iCloud traffic goes there, with a small fraction (<10%) going to Stockholm, which has both AWS and Google data centers, so I assume they're using both for geographical redundancy (erasure coding)
It gets a bit more fuzzy once you start moving into Movies/Music/TV/Billing/whatever as well as their backend services for the store and monitoring.
- https://www.macrumors.com/2023/02/23/app-store-apple-music-a...
- https://www.the-sun.com/tech/4944089/apple-maps-down-icloud-...
- https://www.macrumors.com/2018/03/27/app-store-outage/
- https://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/11/some-apple-services-sufferin...
A sync issue in drive would barely be noticed.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applepayontheweb/d...
I routinely have email issues, file transfer issues (to icloud) and issues accessing their binary notarisation service.
The only thing that works routinely well is Apple Pay, however I think that it's refreshing a key lazily in the background and does not actually need a network connection to work. Good design at least.
So when I saw that they're having an outage, I thought. "All at once this time I guess".
I'll be really open here and say that I applied for an SRE job there out of hatred because whoever is in charge of SRE/Infrastructure Operations at Apple is doing a terrible job (or has terrible circumstances).
Regardless, these kinds of things tend to be somewhat regional. I’m based in Sweden.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/25/23041217/apple-app-store-...
But indeed it's rare.
- activation: wiping an iOS/iPadOS/visionOS device, or reinstalling a mac after a full disk wipe
- apns: push notifications, used for realtime notifications for all apps on iOS/iPadOS, even things like Signal that do not use Apple's messaging infrastructure
- imessage: enough said
- boot ticket signing: required for any mac to do an OS update (it's serialized to the CPU's ECID)
any one of these going down for any significant period of time is going to cause widespread global economic disruption.
Well, that’s because…they’re not text messages.
For SMS, no not a central server for all carriers. When SMS service originally launched it wasn’t even cross-carrier.
MMS acts like a mailserver at each carrier, sends a push notification and your device has like a day to download full message.
For RCS it’s supposed to be federated but carriers gave up and it’s now centralized through Google Jibe.
Guess this explains it.
Does Apple internally do something like COE's like Amazon?