Apple faces several days of outages in its IP obfuscation service iCloud Private Relay Apparently it was eventually brought under control. But Official System Status Website The error message was removed on Monday evening with a note that the problem had been “fixed.” Previously, surfing with the service active was impossible for a long time, even though Apple said only “some users” were affected.
Advertisement
There’s always trouble with Wednesday
The problems started on Wednesday evening last week when users reported a massive iCloud Private Relay outage. The service allows surfing via Apple’s servers (two hops in total) to protect IP addresses, which aims to improve privacy on the web. Additionally, iCloud Private Relay encrypts unencrypted app connections on iPhone and iPad. The outage meant that users who had activated iCloud Private Relay were no longer able to work in the Safari browser. There was only an unreported error message (see above) and the tab was subsequently lost.
After a few hours it seemed that the problem was resolved on Thursday morning, but it didn’t last long: a short time later it started again, which lasted for several days. Apple only acknowledged the fact that the outage still happened after a considerable delay. There was also no information from the company on what to do. Ultimately, the only thing that helped was to disable iCloud Private Relay first. Other browsers like Chrome or Firefox were not affected, but Safari on iPhone, iPad and Mac was.
Part of an iCloud+ subscription
iCloud Private Relay is not a standard feature. The system is only available to users if they have also purchased iCloud storage as part of an iCloud+ subscription. However, many users do so. The service is activated by default and can be turned off through the system settings. However, Apple clearly warns users about what could cause those affected to leave the function active even during the outage – with the consequences outlined above.
Apple still hasn’t provided any information on why the problem occurred or apologized for the poor support during the outage. Users initially didn’t know if the problem was theirs or Apple’s. iCloud Private Relay has an automatic shutdown function when a failure occurs. But even this didn’t work properly and the service was left active initially.
(B.Sc.)
