Apple

Time for Apple To Come Clean About iCloud

Mysteries and Migraines in the Cloud

Dan Moren of Six Colors might have found a hint that might help unlock the Apple Migraine Mystery I have slowly been piecing together clue by clue in my ongoing Apple iCloud woes. He recently ran into his own iCloud issues (thought different than mine) and blogged about what he suspects might be one of the root causes. Again, his situation is different than mine, but if his conclusions are correct it comes closer to confirming my suspicions that iCloud is the culprit.

Here’s an excerpt from his post Bitten by the black box of iCloud.

. . . after perhaps 20 minutes on the phone, he seemed to hit on something. I heard him laugh and say something along the lines of “that explains it” and then, with my consent, put me on hold. When he came back, he said — and I’m not exactly quoting, but close enough: “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you any more than this, but all your services should be back up pretty much exactly 12 hours after they went down.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you any more than this, but all your services should be back up pretty much exactly 12 hours after they went down.” Sorry for the repetition but it’s key. It’s a tantalizing clue for what I think might be behind this migraine mystery. Spoiler alert, Moren saw things begin to return to almost normal after waiting the requisite 12 hours.

Backstory

Here’s a brief recap of what I’ve been tracking with my iCloud migraines. All features relating to Continuity/Handoff/Sign in with Watch would just switch off. No warning. No nothing. Just working one minute. Then not the next. Intriguingly I began to notice this would happen on the morning of each new OS update (iOS, watchOS, and Mac). This has been going on for almost a year since the fall of 2022. This includes beta releases since WWDC 2023, even though I ran no betas on any of these devices. The pattern that I began associating with OS releases became apparent to me in late spring of this year. Things flipped off the mornings of iOS (and sibling) releases from 16.4.1 last April and has continued each morning through the release of 17.0.3.

I would try to fix the issues with a series of reboots that for a time seemed to rectify things, but then that eventually failed as a solution. And then I noticed that within a day or so, often the next morning, things would magically come back, with zero intervention from me. Since this fall’s releases of iOS 17 and its siblings this has also occurred with through 17.0.3 which was released on Wednesday of this week.

Add this to the clues:

When this situation first surfaced last Fall I spoke with Apple Support. After jumping through the usual hoops and getting to a higher tier of support we would eventually step through possible fixes until we reached the dreaded “log out of iCloud” solution. I say “dreaded” because if you ever need to do that there’s never any degree of certainity that everything will come back to “normal.”

And then…

I was literally on a support call in July when we had reached the moment I knew was coming. I said to the rep that I was going to have to sign out of iCloud. And the answer was “no, we don’t suggest you do that.” I was floored. This was the first time I had gotten that type of response. Of course my response was to ask what I should do. I was placed on hold and then the response came “our engineers are aware of this and we suggest waiting until they reach a solution. We’re working on it.” The next morning things were working again.

That sounds somewhat similar to what Dan experienced although there was no mention of a 12-hour timeline. I’ve gotten this “please wait” suggestion on this issue three times now. The third one was a most interesting reiteration of the first two. I’ll recount that below after some more backstory.

Backstory continued

I’ve had two previous show stopping issues with Apple products. Both times I’d reached the point when I was ready to toss in the towel. The first was with the original Apple Watch. The second was with Notes.

Both times I was getting zero satisfaction from Apple Support. So, I decided to write Tim Cook. I explained my dissatisfaction with the lack of solutions. Within a couple of days I got a response from someone obviously higher up in the chain saying they would work to make sure I was satisified. They were always very nice, very thorough and followed up as if their job depended on it.

The first time resulted in me receiving a new Apple Watch after returning the malfunctioning one. The second resulted in me getting connected to an engineer. That experience led to them essentially taking Notes on my account offline after I saved them all locally. They rebuilt my Notes database on their end. Called me back. I logged in and almost everything came back. (The original problem is that Notes would not sync at all and some data was getting lost as I may work situation was I was switching back and forth between devices.)

In both instances in follow up, I was asked not to write about these interactions. Until today I haven’t. So given that after Apple’s latest round of OS updates didn’t solve anything I thought I would reach out to Mr. Cook once again. That third time I referred to earlier was not the charm. Here’s the response I got back:

Hello Warner,

Thank you for your recent correspondence to Apple. We apologize for the delay in our response.

The parties with whom you have previously communicated are empowered by Apple to address concerns such as yours. In each of your communications you have been provided with the same answer from Apple. According to your case number 102054684817: Apple is still investigating the issue and we won’t be able to provide an exact ETA on when it will be resolved. There is no further escalation point that will deal with this matter differently.

We regret that you are not satisfied with this response, because Apple strives for customer satisfaction. It is our sincere hope that this situation will not diminish your enjoyment of the products and services that we provide.

You can also provide feedback to Apple by visiting Product Feedback — Apple.

We apologize for any inconvenience or frustration.

Kind regards,

Apple

Back to the plot

For quite some time based on the clues I’d assembled prior to Dan Moren’s post I have thought this issue I was dealing with was tied to iCloud. I’ve gotten no firm confirmation of that from Apple Support. And given that others I’ve talked to about this suffer from different sets of iCloud issues it has literally been a slog to try and piece it all together.

Apple has quite a few services, features, and devices tied into each user’s AppleID. Scratch that. All of them are tied in. You literally can’t go anywhere within the Apple ecosystem without it. Frankly, it’s one of the attractions. But it’s becoming less so. Comments from support personnel and engineers have indicated, but not directly pointed the finger at iCloud as the potential culprit.

And some of Moren’s comments make sense to me along this line of thinking. For example.

Now, in my initial forays on social media, I had gotten a reply from someone on Mastodon mentioning that Apple’s iCloud servers were sometimes put in maintenance mode for 12 hours — but upon going back and looking for that specific reply, it was nowhere to be found.

It did, however, support the theory that something had gone wrong with the particular iCloud server on which my account was located.

In one of my calls I pressed the support person who warned against signing out of iCloud as to why. It was quite telling that I couldn’t get a response other than tacit agreement with my statement that it was problematic that things never came completely back from signing out and signing back in. That didn’t used to be the case. I can’t begin to remember how many times I’ve signed out and back into iCloud at Apple’s suggestion.

Moren did see things “flip” back on 12 hours later. After I read his post I made a note to check things out when I returned home after rehearsal in the evening to see if my devices had seen any such flipping. (My devices flipped off around 8am CDT). I checked about 11:15pm CDT and sure enough everything was working. I normally don’t wake up my Macs until morning and that’s typically when I would discover things had flipped back on.

So I’m feeling my suspicions firm up. This is all tied into how Apple’s iCloud services work behind the scenes. Apple doesn’t want to talk about that. I’m in violent agreement with this statement from Dan Moren:

Moreover, if this was some kind of scheduled procedure, why not warn affected users ahead of time? The idea that my email — which I rely upon for work — and a slew of other services might be interrupted for essentially an entire workday with no notice whatsoever is technological malpractice. My cable company tells me when it’s doing work in my area and there might be service hiccups, and you can bet that the hosting provider I use for my website communicates whenever there might be something that affects my service.

And this:

The thing is Apple fundamentally doesn’t want you to think they’re like “other” service companies. They’re not going to send you emails about upcoming outages, or a digest of all the spam that silently got blocked from your account so you can find the ones that should have gotten through, because it flies in the face of the image that Apple wants to put forth, that their magical system “just works.” But the problem with a black box is that once you’re inside, you have no idea what’s going on — and it’s even harder to get out.

Look. I get it. There’s no easy or ideal time if there’s work of some kind going on in the backend that might lead to a service disruption. But Apple should at least empower its support personnel to communicate to users who call with an issue if that is the case. Even if that won’t solve the problem until some engineer somewhere flips things back on, it would at least remove some frustration and wasted time in the support conversations.

I’m beginning to think that Apple keeps this as another one of its secrets from not only users but user facing personnel as well. If so, it’s a self-destructive policy that gives lie to Apple’s image-making. Even if “a small minority of users” are facing this issue at any one time. If true, it certainly speaks to how Apple values what it perceives as its reputation over the cash value of paying Apple support personnel to sit on lengthy support calls that can’t offer answers.

I encourage you to read Moren’s post in full. In the meantime maybe I’ll find and configure a 12-hour timer as one of the fancy new interactive widgets that I can activate the next time Apple flips the switch.