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This week had both good and bad news. In good news, iOS 8.1.3 now requires less space to upgrade. On the other hand, the bad news is that logging into iTunes connect now gives you access to a random account 😏.

All joking aside, I think there is a serious point to make here. From what I can determine from the tweets, there was about a 30-45 minute period when people logging in to iTunes Connect were seeing other random accounts instead of their own. After that, iTunes Connect was shut down for about 4 hours before silently coming back up as if nothing had happened, while the most useless page on the internet stayed all green for the vast majority of the downtime.

There was naturally lots of speculation on exactly what the issue was. I think the most likely is something I saw Padraig Kennedy speculate on, that what people were seeing was a staging/test system (maybe for Analytics?). However, even if the data was not editable it does appear to be real data, with real unreleased apps/app versions and real revenue (we're seeing revenue information for another developer's apps in AppFigures - This is incorrect, revenue was not appearing in AppFigures. See my update below for an explanation). Whichever way you look at it, this was a serious bug/issue.

Now I'm being quite harsh here. I understand that these mistakes occasionally happen, and when you're the size of Apple those mistakes become very public. There's nothing that can be done about the fact that this occurred. What I have a problem with is the way it was handled. I know Apple don't make public statements about this kind of event until they are certain what happened. But to bring the service back up without any kind of statement is simply not good enough. For it to be brought back online, you have to think that Apple were 100% certain that the issue was solved. Why are we sitting here more than 18 hours later with no idea what really happened to our data?


Update: I've been in contact with AppFigures and it does seem that revenue was not leaked into AppFigures. We had another iTunes Connect account that had been added to the AppFigures account and we had not noticed these apps before (it's on a big AppFigures account and we were checking for strange data this morning specifically after last night's events). My apologies for not investigating this part of the above thoroughly enough before writing about it. Dave

Dave Verwer  

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