Apple Needed 12 Hours to Fix iTunes

Apple suffered a dramatic iTunes outage that took 11 hours to fix on Wednesday.

As reported yesterday, the iTunes service suffered a major outage that started early Wednesday. It took Apple about 12 hours to fix. The Apple System Status shows an 11 hour outage, but reports of iTunes issues appeared well before Apple started to show the outage in their service monitoring tool.

So what happened? According to a brief Apple statement “an internal DNS error” is to blame. DNS errors are often the cause of severe service outages. A DNS error is time consuming to fix as data is replicated and cached with long update intervals. These long update intervals are necessary for performance. When an error gets into the system, it is like a virus. There should be some thought put in to make fixing a DNS error quicker. 

Another interpretation of why companies often claim that an internal DNS error is to blame might be though to cover up something else. To have an internal DNS error is an accepted bad error that takes long to fix. A company does not loose its face with saying that. It is much worse to say to have been hacked or an employee sabotaged the system.

Apple and content developers and artists lost a ton of money yesterday as iTunes was not able to serve customers for half a day. iTunes customers have been unable to make purchases from the App Store, iTunes Store, iBooks Store, or Mac App Store.