Apple's refreshed system status page tracks services, stores and iCloud

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Apple on Thursday rolled out an update to the iCloud status webpage, which now covers 32 online services and a graphical representation of outages as they occur on a sliding timeline.

System Status Page
Apple's new system status page. | Source: Apple


Unlike the service's previous iteration, Apple's revamped system status page offers a comprehensive look at most of its critical online assets, including Messages, iTunes and everything iCloud. As noted by the webpage's title, the system tracks "Apple Services, Stores, and iCloud."

Also added is a new interactive timeline at the bottom of the page that allows users to scroll through past few days to see when problems were recorded and for how long. Currently the timeline only goes as far back as Dec. 11, likely the date on which data collection began.

Timeline


Overall, the update is a huge improvement to its predecessor, which only gave brief descriptions of outages as they occured without an easy way to track performance over time.

iCloud Status
Apple's previous iCloud status webpage lacked information and was slow to update.


While the newly redesigned page is a welcome improvement in keeping users up to date, a more pressing issue is the recent series of outages suffered by Apple's cloud-based services. The latest downtime came in November when an issue hit U.S. iMessage and FaceTime users. It was the fourth such outage in the three months, coming after an incident in September and two in October (1, 2) that affected both iOS and OS X Messages users.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 10


    Quite nice. I rather like this. And a timeline of past down-ness? Really good. Not many companies would show that.


     


    Recently I've come to like hatching in UI design, and I like how the hatching looks here. It's subtle, but it's well done.

  • Reply 2 of 10


    But is there an app for this? A link within another app? How can this be used easily by customers? Just a bookmark in Safari? That seems a bit retrograde.

  • Reply 3 of 10
    Looks very slick indeed, I agree.

    Recently I installed Little Snitch, and it shows that a lot of Apple Services, like these, are run on Microsoft Azure and .Net technology. I wonder what else they use. I know there'r some Sun servers used, but is that it? Or are there more suppliers, even if it's just to balance the risk of possible outages?
  • Reply 4 of 10
    gazoobeegazoobee Posts: 3,754member
    It looks great, but still doesn't mean much in that even a small fraction of a percent of downtime to any of those services is still a huge number of inconvenienced people in absolute numbers.

    For instance the email sometimes goes down and if previously you could find any mention of it at all, it would say something like "less than 1% of users affected," but that can still mean (and often does) that whole countries, states, or provinces are without email for the day.

    They would do better to indicate the conditions locally instead of globally. Do I really care if 99.5% of users are okay if the entire city that I'm in can't currently use the service? Users in even more far flung locations than I could be without *any* service for days before it even showed up as the tiniest blip on this graph.
  • Reply 5 of 10


    Originally Posted by Gazoobee View Post

    …even a small fraction of a percent of downtime to any of those services is still a huge number of inconvenienced people in absolute numbers.


     


    That's true for any service from any company. What, do you expect them to have a webpage up like,


     


    Adam A. Aadamson



    David P. Barnes


    Julia M. Baughmann


    Ted D. Bedford



    Marjorie E. Oliver



    Jonathan E. Zilz


     


    Your [service name here] is down. Sorry, peeps.

  • Reply 6 of 10
    I think he means he want numbers instead of percentages or a general graph.
  • Reply 7 of 10


    Originally Posted by PhilBoogie View Post

    I think he means he want numbers instead of percentages or a general graph.




    I would think locations would be even better than that. Numbers, hey, that's meaningless. We know the number from the percentage because we know how many iOS devices there are total.

  • Reply 8 of 10

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by SpamSandwich View Post


    But is there an app for this? A link within another app? How can this be used easily by customers? Just a bookmark in Safari? That seems a bit retrograde.



    Once you bring it up in Safari, click the share icon and select 'Add to Home Screen' and name it something like Apple Status - works great.  

  • Reply 9 of 10
    Indeed, location is most useful. I checked to see if the .com/support/systemstatus was different from other TLD's, but it's not (as the moment), just a translated page. I never understood outages being displayed that weren't effecting me. 2008 MobileMe transition? Zilch problems at my end, albeit at times 'slow email' during the first 6 days or so. Perhaps a small country gets a small server, with a small number of outages - lol This actually made me feel ...* of the fact that Steve 'went global' on saying that MM was 'a fiasco' because it surely wasn't over here. Then again, he was binary (insert smiley or whatever here; I don't use 'em)

    * can't find the right word; English is not my native language
  • Reply 10 of 10
    Well this is more convenient
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