Apple Dev Sites Down

Both the Apple Developer Forums (Fora?), which is used by developers to chat and support each other, and the Developer Center (a web portal used by developers to download developer content from Apple, manage security certificates and device provisioning profiles, and more) have been down since Thursday July 19.  Many have speculated that this has delayed the delivery of iOS 7 Beta 4 build because Beta 1, 2, and 3 were 2 weeks apart each, although Apple never promised any schedule for Beta builds.

It came out that security researcher Ibrahim Balic has claimed responsibility, who says he has made Apple aware of the security holes in an attempt to help them improve security on their site.

Meanwhile, my take on it is that Apple must have a huge team of software engineers working around the clock to fix the security holes, and testing to ensure the sites work, because they are still down 5 days after the hack.  The fact that within a couple hours of getting their bug report filed by Balic, they shut down the web sites means they take the privacy and security concerns very seriously.  They know that hundreds of millions of people globally depend on their devices for many important things, and I know that they know there is also huge liability.  So I bet this was a quick executive decision to shut down the web sites, and not turn them back on until the issues have been corrected.  I can understand, but I don't have to like!

Finally, iOS 7 Beta 4 is out!  I can only imagine the kind of hell the Apple team has gone through in the past 2 weeks, but thank you for great products, great support, and your commitment to keeping the integrity and security of your systems.