Apple has apparently managed to fix a bug related to syncing apps with iCloud that has been around since at least last fall. This is reported by developers who have been in contact with the company.
This seems to be Apple’s response to increasing public pressure. Both users, who could no longer reliably store their data in Apple’s server cloud, and developers had recently complained massively on Twitter.
Adjustment not possible or only possible with a delay
The bug caused apparently random server errors to occur when attempting to synchronize with iCloud. Some developers shared that they could no longer rely on Apple’s service and were therefore looking for alternatives. Apple then seems to have finally started to really get to the bottom of the error – even if, as mentioned, it had been reported by developers for months. In some cases, users are even said to have lost their data.
well seem the sync processes to work as desired again. In the last two days, he has seen that the number of problem reports has fallen “to basically zero,” writes well-known developer Paul Haddad. Previously, the error message “request failed with http status code 503” had appeared regularly in the logs.
Bad days for iCloud
Despite the positive news, yesterday and the day before were actually not a good day for iCloud. On Wednesday night, the first failures of numerous services were reported – including iCloud photos, Game Center, Mail, backups and numerous others, even including the iCloud.com web interface. Even more annoying: owners of Apple devices sometimes received dozens of requests to re-enter their Apple ID password. If this was done, there was either a time-out error, another error message, or the password dialog showed up again after a few minutes. It was then on Twitter the official apple support account is under siege, but could not help. The storm has now subsided.
While the problem persisted, Apple’s system status page presented no or belated problems – unfortunately typical. It is still unclear whether the constantly appearing password dialog represents a potential security problem and how specifically it came about – such queries shouldn’t actually appear simply because there are iCloud problems. The incident is reminiscent of a server error in autumn 2020, in which Macs with an existing Internet connection could be completely paralyzed because “fail gracefully” routines were missing. Apple then announced changes to the certificate verification, but was initially silent on the subject.
(bsc)