Why Did the Apple Developer Website Go Offline?

parallax_newsHave you been having a hard time reaching the Apple Developer Website? You weren’t going crazy. They have released a press release explaining the lag in time. Apple took the site down on Thursday once they found that an “intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers.”

The information was encrypted and Apple doesn’t believe it can be accessed, but they still couldn’t rule out that some names, mailing addresses, and email addresses were leaked. Because of that, they wanted to inform everyone and took the site down, “working around the clock since then” to repair the issue.

Apple claims they are “completely overhauling our developer systems” to prevent something similar happening again. They are updating the server software and rebuilding the entire database. They expect the site to be up again soon.

The obvious question in all of this is what will this do to the existing developer accounts that currently get the benefit of using beta versions of iOS and OS X. Will they no longer be provided such easy access in order to keep out the other nefarious individuals? We’ll have to wait and see. Until then, here’s the text in the Apple press release.

Last Thursday, an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers from our developer website. Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed, however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed. In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you of the issue. We took the site down immediately on Thursday and have been working around the clock since then.

In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database. We apologize for the significant inconvenience that our downtime has caused you and we expect to have the developer website up again soon.

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