Chargebee Acquires numberz and Launches Chargebee Receivables

What’s that saying? An apple a day keeps the outages at bay? No, that’s not it, but Apple wishes that was the case. Apple’s week started with outages on Monday and Tuesday, causing temporary service disruptions on a range of its services. CNET reports that these Apple services experienced issues: the App Store, Apple Arcade, Apple Music, Apple TV+, iCloud, iOS Device Activation, Find My, Maps, AppleCare, iTunes Store, Fitness Plus, Podcasts, Radio, Apple Business Manager, Apple Cash, Apple Pay and Wallet, Apple School Manager, Documents in the Cloud, iMessage, Device Enrollment Program, iWork for iCloud and Schoolwork.

What went down and when depends on which Apple services users and subscribers were trying to access at any given time. In some cases, users received outage notices that said they might experience “intermittent issues” or that service might be “slow or unavailable,” according to CNET. In addition to the notifications, Apple updated its system status page to show which services were working, which problems were resolved and which were still experiencing difficulties.

The outages for some services continued on Tuesday. Among the Apple services affected Tuesday were Apple Books, Podcasts, the Mac App Store, Game Center, iCloud web apps, Apple Card and Weather. The Apple Post said that Apple’s internal corporate and in-store retail systems were also affected. Though Apple has not made a statement about the outages, Bloomberg News said Apple told staff that the outage was related to the DNS, or domain name system.

TIME magazine reported that the outages kept some corporate employees from working from home. Other service issues caused by the outages included product repairs and swaps that couldn’t be completed, items couldn’t be picked up, and the company had internal communication issues.

As of 3:59 p.m. Pacific time yesterday, Apple reported that all systems were operating normally.

Apple launches first state ID in Wallet

Apple’s week did, however, improve. Yesterday, Apple announced the launch of the first driver’s license and state ID in Wallet in Arizona. The company has been talking about this since at least last fall, and we first reported the news in September 2021. At that time, Apple said that eight states and TSA would allow/honor driver’s licenses and state IDs in the Apple Wallet on users’ iPhones or Apple Watches with Arizona and Georgia being the first. Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma and Utah will follow.

“We’re thrilled to bring the first driver’s license and state ID in Wallet to Arizona today, and provide Arizonans with an easy, secure, and private way to present their ID when traveling, through just a tap of their iPhone or Apple Watch,” said Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s vice president of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet, in the company’s announcement. “We look forward to working with many more states and the TSA to bring IDs in Wallet to users across the US.”

Insider Take

Though Apple’s service disruptions were widespread across many of their services, this is a bit of a rarity for the Cupertino, California-based company. They weren’t the only company affected by outages over the last several days, according to Downdetector’s Twitter feed which shows outages for FedEx, RingCentral, GitHub and others during the same time period. The bottom line is that we are so reliant on technology that when forced to do without it, we are a bit frozen, and we want to share our frustration with the world on social media. Fortunately, in this case, Apple kept their status page updated, and they fixed the problem as soon as they could. Losing service for any period of time can be challenging, but thankfully it doesn’t happn very often.