Apple Music, App Store, iTunes & more buckle under VMA announcement traffic

Posted:
in iPod + iTunes + AppleTV edited July 2015
A range of Apple's cloud-based services, including the App Store, iTunes, and even OS X Software Update were affected on Tuesday, likely from excess traffic associated with MTV's 2015 Video Music Awards nominees exclusively revealed on Beats 1.




Apple's own System Status page indicates that the outage began on Tuesday just before 10 a.m. Eastern. That's when MTV had advertised it would announce the 2015 VMA nominees on Apple's Beats 1 radio station.

The outage affected a wide range of Apple's online services, including the Apple TV, iBooks Store, iTunes Match, iTunes U, and the Mac App Store. Also affected were Apple Radio and Apple Music.

According to Apple, only some users were affected by the outage, which applied to all of the company's store services. A reason for the outage was not specifically given, as Apple simply said it was "investigating" the matter.

The outage's presumed connection to the VMA nominees puts the spotlight once again on Apple's online services, and their ability to stay online in the face of an influx of traffic. Apple has made a major push for exclusive content on Apple Music and Beats 1 since the services launched last month.
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 47
    [SIZE=4]Fortunately the Chinese interpreter was able to get through again...[/SIZE]
  • Reply 2 of 47
    bageljoeybageljoey Posts: 2,004member
    Ha! I was just trying out the Apple Music service this morning. At 10:30 nothing would load. I thought it was something wrong with the service in general. This is actually good news...
  • Reply 3 of 47
    karmadavekarmadave Posts: 369member

    Yep. The iTunes Store and Apple Music are down...

  • Reply 4 of 47
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    Meh.
  • Reply 5 of 47
    slurpyslurpy Posts: 5,382member

    And morons were proclaiming that this would not motivate people to tune in to Beats1..

  • Reply 6 of 47

    What's up with Apple's servers -- whether during product intros, keynotes, or stuff like this -- during peak times? I realize that a lot of companies (esp. gaming companies when announcing new games) have these issues, but they are far from the largest market cap company in the world with a s***-load of cash.

     

    Surely, there must be some smarter way for Apple to deal with such episodes of peak demand? Electric utilities do it. Telecom companies do it. Amazon seems to do it.

  • Reply 7 of 47
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Slurpy View Post

     

    And morons were proclaiming that this would not motivate people to tune in to Beats1..




    "Likely due to traffic" =/= "due to traffic". It's not like the other outages were related to excess traffic. Unless we receive confirmation it's too early to make a judgment.

     

     

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by anantksundaram View Post

     

    What's up with Apple's servers -- whether during product intros, keynotes, or stuff like this -- during peak times? I realize that a lot of companies (esp. gaming companies when announcing new games) have these issues, but they are far from the largest market cap company in the world with a s***-load of cash.

     

    Surely, there must be some smarter way for Apple to deal with such episodes of peak demand? Electric utilities do it. Telecom companies do it. Amazon seems to do it.




    Some of it is Apple building out their own CDN, unless things have changed they're also still relying on Akamai and Level 3 for backup.

  • Reply 8 of 47
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by TheWhiteFalcon View Post

     

    Some of it is Apple building out their own CDN, unless things have changed they're also still relying on Akamai and Level 3 for backup.


    Those are poor excuses.

  • Reply 9 of 47
    konqerrorkonqerror Posts: 685member
    Quote:



    Originally Posted by TheWhiteFalcon View Post



    Some of it is Apple building out their own CDN, unless things have changed they're also still relying on Akamai and Level 3 for backup.


     

    This shows why Apple's CDN is a bad idea. The point of a CDN, or any network in general, is to share capacity to reduce costs, since everybody doesn't need all capacity all the time. Apple isn't likely to have an event, the same day Amazon has a huge sale, on the same day that Microsoft releases Windows 10. If you have only one customer, then your capacity sits idle most of the time, defeating the whole purpose.

     

    Beyond that, Apple sucks at the Internet.

  • Reply 10 of 47
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by konqerror View Post

     

     

    This shows why Apple's CDN is a bad idea. The point of a CDN, or any network in general, is to share capacity to reduce costs, since everybody doesn't need all capacity all the time. Apple isn't likely to have an event, the same day Amazon has a huge sale, on the same day that Microsoft releases Windows 10. If you have only one customer, then your capacity sits idle most of the time, defeating the whole purpose.

     

    Beyond that, Apple sucks at the Internet.




    I think they just wanted to use that Class A IP block they've had forever.

  • Reply 11 of 47
    rogifanrogifan Posts: 10,669member
    Apple's cloud services buckeld because of the VMA announcements? Seriously?
  • Reply 12 of 47
    newbeenewbee Posts: 2,055member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by anantksundaram View Post

     

    What's up with Apple's servers -- whether during product intros, keynotes, or stuff like this -- during peak times? I realize that a lot of companies (esp. gaming companies when announcing new games) have these issues, but they are far from the largest market cap company in the world with a s***-load of cash.

     

    Surely, there must be some smarter way for Apple to deal with such episodes of peak demand? Electric utilities do it. Telecom companies do it. Amazon seems to do it.




    I'm not sure that the examples you've given are comparable at all to what Apple experiences. I just cannot imagine that 100s of millions of people, world wide, would suddenly feel the urge to log on Amazon to buy something at the same time, and stay logged on for a long period of time. Apple's problem is, imho, one of continued growth. As soon as they get caught up to a certain level, the numbers increase wildly. If I'm not mistaken, Apple has been adding cloud services and storage at a pretty impressive pace but, as one might expect, you cannot add server farms the size of which Apple is building, overnight. I think it is time for all of us to remember that "patience is a virtue". just saying'.  :) 

  • Reply 13 of 47
    macvictamacvicta Posts: 346member
    And it's still down. Two hours later. They want me to pay them $9.99 a month to rent music that they can't even reliably stream? Why do this VMA crap if you don't have the wherewithal to handle the traffic?
  • Reply 14 of 47
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by newbee View Post



    I'm not sure that the examples you've given are comparable at all to what Apple experiences. I just cannot imagine that 100s of millions of people, world wide, would suddenly feel the urge to log on Amazon to buy something at the same time, and stay logged on for a long period of time. Apple's problem is, imho, one of continued growth. As soon as they get caught up to a certain level, the numbers increase wildly. If I'm not mistaken, Apple has been adding cloud services and storage at a pretty impressive pace but, as one might expect, you cannot add server farms the size of which Apple is building, overnight. I think it is time for all of us to remember that "patience is a virtue". just saying'.  :) 


    I honestly don't wish to beat this to death -- I'll stop on this issue after this post! -- but a couple of observations. Amazon does get slammed during Black Fridays and what they did a couple of weeks ago (I forget what they called it). Companies like Alibaba have it even worse with Singles Day and such. Also, if Apple can't build out its servers fast enough, it should outsource. That's what everyone else does.

  • Reply 15 of 47



    it just works .... not.

    Microsoft is ISO compliant with guaranteed uptime of 99.9999%; Amazon is; heck, even Dropbox is. Apple, instead, is just flaky and truly unreliable. It's mail; it's the calendar; it's iCloud drive; it's Apple Music; it's basically all web services that are unreliable. That's nothing new but astounding that Apple is not able to fix it.

     

    What's new is that Apple's hardware starts to get flaky. I've needed to turn in iPhone 6 four times already. My friend has turned in iPhone 6 twice. Another friend of mine has turned in iPhone 6 three times, .... really? I have spent hours on Apple's customer support in order to identify a problem with WiFi with my rMBP13'; after several tests and resets and clean installs, they changed the chip, then the display, then sent the MBPr in and did whatever, now I get a max Tx rate of 150 MBit/s on a n-network. 

     

    And they want me to get a watch? Add even more complexity to my ecosystem? A car? 

     

    no thanks. I might get an iPad and install all MS products possible in order to get my work done (who would ever have thought so).

     

    -.-

  • Reply 16 of 47
    mstonemstone Posts: 11,510member

    It is probably not a case of too much traffic, but just new untested networks. I'd guess they are making lots of changes to the network infrastructure with all this Apple Music stuff and they probably screwed something up. Designing and managing edge routers, firewalls and load balancers is pretty complicated stuff. A single misconfiguration can produce a cascading accidental ddos, but there is no better 'rubber meets road' load testing scenario then a high demand event. I've seen this happen at our shared data center. When you are growing your network as fast as Apple, you just have to learn from your mistakes. There really is no way to load test these things in advance when it involves several peering backbones.

  • Reply 17 of 47
    techlovertechlover Posts: 879member

    There is no excuse for Apple to have these ongoing downtime issues across it's cloud products.

     

    If Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Dropbox, Alibaba, etc. can do it then Apple should be able to do it.

     

    No excuse. It's time for Apple to get it together. They need to hire and/or fire the proper people or outsource the whole thing to the big boys who have a proven track record. Maybe they should stick to churning out great hardware.

     

    Software and the internet seem to be Apples achilles heal these days.

  • Reply 18 of 47
    newbeenewbee Posts: 2,055member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by mstone View Post

     

    It is probably not a case of too much traffic, but just new untested networks. I'd guess they are making lots of changes to the network infrastructure with all this Apple Music stuff and they probably screwed something up. Designing and managing edge routers, firewalls and load balancers is pretty complicated stuff. A single misconfiguration can produce a cascading accidental ddos, but there is no better 'rubber meets road' load testing scenario then a high demand event. I've seen this happen at our shared data center. When you are growing your network as fast as Apple, you just have to learn from your mistakes. There really is no way to load test these things in advance when it involves several peering backbones.




    Thanks for the info. This makes sense to me.

  • Reply 19 of 47
    lkrupplkrupp Posts: 10,557member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by TechLover View Post

     

    There is no excuse for Apple to have these ongoing downtime issues across it's cloud products.

     

    If Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Dropbox, Alibaba, etc. can do it then Apple should be able to do it.

     

    No excuse. It's time for Apple to get it together. They need to hire and/or fire the proper people or outsource the whole thing to the big boys who have a proven track record. Maybe they should stick to churning out great hardware.

     

    Software and the internet seem to be Apples achilles heal these days.




    Yep, Apple is on its way out, no doubt about it, proudly failing at everything it does since 1977. Steve is dead. It’s all over but the crying. I told my financial advisor to liquidate my AAPL before this afternoon’s debacle takes place.

  • Reply 20 of 47
    mstonemstone Posts: 11,510member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by newbee View Post

     



    Thanks for the info. This makes sense to me.




    Another thing to notice is that all the systems that are down are the huge data services like OS X update, iTunes-U and Mac App Store, etc. It sort of looks like as the system started to fail, they purposely turned off the non-essential huge data services. All the Apple ID, Apple Pay, keychain, iWork, Mail are up. Looks like plan B.

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