The Apple Dev Center is been down for more than 24 hours, according to several reports; the Apple Developer Forums are also down. At this point, one can only speculate on the cause of the outage. Apple has said only that the Dev Center is "undergoing maintenance" but hasn't provided any details as to what is happening or how long the sites will be down.
Attempting to access developer.apple.com/devcenter redirects visitors to a generic page that says, "This site is undergoing maintenance for an extended period today. Thanks for your patience."
The Developer Forums went down shortly after the Developer Center, according to TNW; when I attempted to log in at developer.apple.com/devforums/, I was presented with a page that simply said, "We'll be back soon."
With the Dev Center out, users and developers can't download the iOS 7 beta or Mac SDKs, nor can they provision new devices or update expired certificates. With the forums down, they can't get any pressing questions answered.
This isn't the first time Apple has experienced this type of unannounced outage; however, this one has lasted longer than any in recent memory. Apple's silence on the matter has fueled as sorts of speculation on the cause. Among the theories:
- There's a major revision under way for current iOS and OS X beta cycle, such as new back-end services to support some of their features or developer testing
- Apple has discovered that leaked WWDC videos came from the site, so the company is implementing security measures to block that path
- Apple has suffered some type of major security breach
Again, that's all speculation. As usual, we'll have to wait until Apple's good and ready to shed light on what's going on.
This story, "Why have Apple's Dev Center and forums have been down for more than 24 hours?," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.