Apple Development Center Down for 3 Days and Counting—Longest in Site History

The Apple iOS Dev Center sites for OS X and iOS went offline on Thursday. However, its extension until Friday made developers overly concerned with the site’s downtime condition. This is because the length of the outage is something that hasn’t happened before and developers couldn’t do anything else but to wait and see what happens next.

During the site’s downtime period, a message saying that it will be back soon is flashed on the screen. Furthermore, the OS X and iOS sites advise developers that they are currently undergoing maintenance and had to extend the hours needed to complete the move. Disappointed developers are then encouraged to be more patient with the situation.

As a way to vent their irritation, several developers have turned to their Twitter accounts and exposed the sites’ unusual length of downtime. Some of them have complained that they have been totally denied of access to the resources that are made available in the site by Apple.

The downtime condition of the sites has caused the developers the inability to download the iOS or Mac OS X SDKs. Development therefore becomes more challenging because new devices are not that easy to be authorized for application testing. For aspiring developers, this means that signing up is utterly impossible.

Incidentally, Apple’s developer forums, a place which helps you figure out the reason why your written code is not functioning properly, are also down. With this in mind, developers have no way of exchanging chats about their tools unless they break Apple’s NDA.

Before the sites went on a downtime state, Apple announced that it had an intruder in the site after it had breached the security while attempting to gather personal data of the company’s developers. However, the attempt had been unsuccessful since the needed data were encrypted. Apple is now in the process of totally redesigning its developer systems and had to place the sites under maintenance.

The site has not recovered until now.