As Apple's Developer Center outage continues into its seventh day of downtime, Apple has once again updated the site with a newly updated message for developers that outlines how the company plans to restore functionality and provides a status page that reveals which systems are online.
We plan to roll out our updated systems, starting with Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles, Apple Developer Forums, Bug Reporter, pre-release developer libraries, and videos first. Next, we will restore software downloads, so that the latest betas of iOS 7, Xcode 5, and OS X Mavericks will once again be available to program members. We'll then bring the remaining systems online. To keep you up to date on our progress, we've created a status page to display the availability of our systems.
At the current point in time, iTunes Connect is the only service that is listed as online, but Apple says that it plans to work on Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles immediately, following that with the developer forums, bug reporting tools, and software libraries. Software downloads, including the latest betas of iOS 7, Xcode 5, and OS X Mavericks will follow.
Apple's Developer Center first went offline last Thursday, and on Sunday, Apple revealed that it had been taken down as a precaution after a security breach. It is unclear who was responsible for the hacking, but a security researcher has suggested that he might be to blame for the outage.
Apple says that it has been "working around the clock" on a complete overhaul of its developer systems since the Developer Center was taken down. Apple has noted that developer memberships and apps set to expire during the outage will be given an extension to account for the significant downtime.
Top Rated Comments
This is very similar to how military and intelligence communities react on breaches. That is they don't make many strategic decisions during recovery from a compromise. You just follow established plans and perform practiced procedures.
While this may seem very anal and un-Apple like, many companies of this size have security policies separate from their core corporate culture. Thus such plans are not widely know except to executives and security personnel so these exact response plans are not widely known nor predicted.
Colorblind friendly?
When Software Downloads come back up likely.