Apple Fixes iCloud Private Relay After Extended Outage

Monday July 29, 2024 4:50 am PDT by Hartley Charlton

Apple has resolved the iCloud Private Relay service outage, restoring full functionality for users around the world after several days of disruption.

The recent iCloud Private Relay outage began at 02:34 AM Eastern Time on Thursday and lasted until 10:59 PM Eastern Time on Saturday. The issue disrupted web browsing for some users for over 48 hours, which is an unusually long period for an Apple service outage. The problem was confirmed by Apple through its System Status webpage, where it noted that the service might have been slow or unavailable.

‌iCloud‌ Private Relay is a feature available to ‌iCloud‌+ subscribers, designed to enhance privacy by encrypting browsing data and routing it through two separate relay servers. One of these servers is operated by Apple, while the other is managed by a third party. This setup ensures that neither Apple, internet service providers, nor the websites visited can access users' true browsing information. The service's dual-relay mechanism helps maintain a high level of privacy by separating the user's IP address from their DNS queries, which further obscures the user's online activity.

Users who had disabled ‌iCloud‌ Private Relay to mitigate browsing issues can now go ahead and re-enable the feature to continue utilizing its privacy benefits.

Tag: iCloud

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Top Rated Comments

ppetrovic

29 months ago

There's no easy way for me to confirm this but it looks like it's still flapping every now and then. Quite frustrating.

It's always baffled me how one of the largest technology companies on the planet, with one of the largest market caps cannot fix their Services division for years, even decades on end. Is it an issue of internal company culture? Internal company politics among upper management? It's amazing how the company manages to produce great products across so many verticals that work very good overall, with generally great user experience, but the moment you throw in a TCP/IP layer between those products and the rest of the world, all of a sudden there are network flaps, sync issues, slow uploads to iCloud and a whole cornucopia of other issues...

Get your act together, Apple. We know you can.

Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)

nt5672

29 months ago

With no transparency it is hard to trust Apple services like this.

Apple is no longer the "it just works" company, instead they have become the "we only spend money if the user can conclusively prove beyond a shadow of doubt that a bug exists and we are in a good mood that day" company.

Score: 9 Votes (Like | Disagree)

nono_thank you

29 months ago

is this why Google doesn't load sometimes, like all year not just recently?

I think you just answered your own question?

Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Chungry

29 months ago

Behold the power of Apple’s stellar services offering. Maybe they can also start locking iCloud accounts again for unknown reasons

Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)

PhoenixAnhart

29 months ago

Apple just isn't good with online services imo. iCloud Drive for instance still freezes randomly, also keeping iCloud disabled for Books was a very annoying ordeal I had to work out lately.

Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)