Hackers

The Apple Store was down - and not in a good way

August 17, 2011: 9:51 AM ET

For reasons unclear, the online store was not responding Wednesday morning

[UPDATE: As of 11:10 a.m. EST the store seems to be functioning properly. No new products that I can see. Never did get an explanation from Apple PR.]

[UPDATE 2: As of noon EST, the site seems to be misbehaving again. Still no word out of Apple.]

[UPDATE 3: Reader Mehdi Daoudi of Catchpoint Systems reports that the site had fully recovered by 1:40 p.m. Meanwhile, he has quantified the scale of Apple's Wednesday morning problem with some scary looking charts, one of which we've copied below. Still no explanation from Apple PR.]

Click to enlarge. Source: Catchpoint Systems

[UPDATE 4: MacRumors notes that Apple has added a social dimension to its online store -- allowing users who are so inclined to alert their Twitter and Facebook followers that they have purchased, say, an iPod or a Mac Pro. It's not clear how this could be related to the Wednesday's outages.]

The Apple Store often goes down in a good way -- with the classic yellow Post-it note that signals the imminent arrival of a new product or service.

It went down Wednesday morning in a bad way, failing to respond to requests from its own Web browser and triggering instead an error message telling would-be visitors that "the server where this page is located isn't responding."

Trouble at the North Carolina server farm? A denial of service attack by hacker or hackers unknown?

We've asked Apple (AAPL) PR what's going on. Will update if we get an explanation.

Featured Newsletters

Every morning, discover the companies, deals and trends in tech that are moving markets and making headlines.

Receive Fortune's newsletter on all the deals that matter, from Wall Street to Sand Hill Road. SUBSCRIBE

Covering the digital giants of Silicon Valley and beyond, an in-depth look at enterprise companies, and the startups disrupting them. Written by Michal Lev-Ram and emailed twice weekly.

Anne Fisher answers career-related questions and offers helpful advice for business professionals.

Company Price Change % Change
Bank of America Corp... 7.95 -0.16 -1.97%
Microsoft Corp 31.27 -0.17 -0.54%
Ford Motor Co 12.28 -0.25 -2.00%
General Electric Co 19.39 0.17 0.88%
Citigroup Inc 32.36 -1.00 -3.00%
Data as of Feb 22
Index Last Change % Change
Dow 12,938.67 -27.02 -0.21%
Nasdaq 2,933.17 -15.40 -0.52%
S&P 500 1,357.66 -4.55 -0.33%
Treasuries 2.00 -0.04 -1.96%
Data as of 6:42am ET
Most Popular
Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights
 
White House pushes online privacy bill of rights
 
Fear of Iran is inflating gas prices
 
AT&T CEO pay docked $2 million for T-Mobile debacle
 
79% of fund managers didn't beat the S&P
 
Market indexes are shown in real time, except for the DJIA, which is delayed by two minutes. All times are ET. Disclaimer LIBOR Warning: Neither BBA Enterprises Limited, nor the BBA LIBOR Contributor Banks, nor Reuters, can be held liable for any irregularity or inaccuracy of BBA LIBOR. Disclaimer. Morningstar: © 2012 Morningstar, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Disclaimer The Dow Jones IndexesSM are proprietary to and distributed by Dow Jones & Company, Inc. and have been licensed for use. All content of the Dow Jones IndexesSM © 2012 is proprietary to Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Chicago Mercantile Association. The market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. FactSet Research Systems Inc. 2012. All rights reserved. Most stock quote data provided by BATS.
Powered by WordPress.com VIP.