Tell HN: Apple development certificate server seems down?

106 points by strongpigeon 23 hours ago on hackernews | 38 comments

For those wondering why this is a big deal it means that every developers attempting to run a development version of an iPhone, iPad or MacOS app cannot run their apps right now.

This is worse than Github being down and Apple Developers who pay 99$ a year for the privilege of writing software on this ecosystem aren't event getting a status page update: https://developer.apple.com/system-status/

ToucanLoucan | 22 hours ago

Can confirm. Spent over an hour trying to figure out why I couldn't build to devices just to get frustrated, browse to HN, and here we are.

I'm looking for a job shoveling pig shit as we speak.

What genuinely pisses me off is that this isn't noted on their status page, nor is it indicated at all when you, I dunno, revoke and generate certs repeatedly trying to solve a problem you didn't fucking cause.

: shagie | 18 hours ago
> I'm looking for a job shoveling pig shit as we speak.
https://www.goatops.com

andyvanosdale | 19 hours ago

It's definitely not worse than GitHub being down...

_heimdall | 19 hours ago

Depends on your priorities. Many developers don't pay for github access, and no one pays github 15-30% of gross sales.

Brian_K_White | 18 hours ago

And a lot more people use github for something at all and don't use Apple for anything at all.

The entire Apple universe is smaller than the world or even just the github part of the world, and the Apple developer universe is a tiny fraction of even just the Apple universe.

: Terretta | 8 hours ago
> The entire Apple universe is smaller than the world or even just the github part of the world
As of 2023, GitHub had 100M active users total.
As of a decade ago (2016) Apple already had 782 million total iCloud users, with 73% or 570 million of them authenticated to iCloud.
By 2023, Apple has 973 million paying subscribers.

cyberax | 18 hours ago

You can still work locally if GH is down. You can even send patches by (gasp!) email for review if you want to do something ASAP.

Apple's servers being down makes it impossible to test your code on your _own_ devices.

xethos | 17 hours ago

> Apple's servers being down makes it impossible to test your code on your _own_ devices.

Which makes it sound an awful lot like they aren't actually your devices

bathtub365 | 16 hours ago

Can’t you still test on simulator

: cyberax | 14 hours ago
You can, but it's a simulator and it often doesn't behave like real devices. Doubly so if you want to do something media-heavy.

monero-xmr | 19 hours ago

The only thing worse is trying to get a denied Google Play review to change… considering you can’t even provide a comment to the reviewer objecting to your update

rendaw | 13 hours ago

I had signed up for an Apple Developer account for "sign in with apple". I had auto-renew on. For the last month or so I was getting increasingly urgent emails about "Your Apple Developer Program membership expires in X days.". I logged into the website and there was a text block talking about a "renew" button that didn't exist on the page. According to reddit this is because mine is set to auto-renew so it's fine (why the text though, then?). A few days ago the subscription expired without auto-renewing. And I realized, maybe I don't need "sign in with apple".

They couldn't be trying harder to sink this ship.

deminature | 13 hours ago

All of Apple's software is rotting, from OSX to iOS to the developer tools. Massive bugs like the keyboard no longer working properly [1] are left unresolved for years. Whichever executive or engineering leader used to keep the quality bar high must have left or stopped paying attention. There also seems to be little culture of quality and ownership at the IC level.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo

Terretta | 8 hours ago

> And I realized, maybe I don't need "sign in with apple".

Developers don't have to have most things they put in the apps they ship. Customers, on the other hand...

As of a decade ago (2016) Apple already had 782 million total (including free) iCloud users, with 73% or 570 million of them authenticated to iCloud.

By 2023, Apple has 973 million paying subscribers to its services.

: ASalazarMX | 2 hours ago
This is more about Apple predatory tactics within their walled garden than actual improvement of their services. Not paying Apple for additional storage means you can't even be sure your phone backup in iCloud is complete.

[OP] strongpigeon | 23 hours ago

I'm getting invalid certificates from https://ppq.apple.com. I think that's probably the root cause?

gt565k | 23 hours ago

Hilarious... their provisioning profile query server has an expired SSL certificate?

Are you serious Apple?

[OP] strongpigeon | 23 hours ago

It doesn't look expired per se:

  Issued On Wednesday, January 21, 2026 at 9:47:41 AM
  Expires On Wednesday, February 17, 2027 at 10:28:16 AM

What I get is: net::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID

: gt565k | 23 hours ago
Has some undisclosed error.
Says cannot be trusted when validating via SSL checker
https://decoder.link/sslchecker/ppq.apple.com/443
: gt565k | 23 hours ago
SSL Error: Verify return code: 34 (unhandled critical extension)

xutopia | 23 hours ago

OMG my app just got rejected because I didn't have the right screenshots to their liking... an app specifically made to remember stuff like this LOL the irony!

gt565k | 23 hours ago

Enterprise apps distributed via MDM & signed using in-house distribution certificates are dead in the water too with the error message "Unable to Verify App" showing on start-up.

Apple's status page is showing no problems (all green).

This is a really bad look for Apple.

ynac | 23 hours ago

Any other services down for anyone? I've had a credit service portal fail for hours today with a notice of server issues. As well as a credit union login with a similar message. These are all first times for me. Some big black cape / hat pressure testing?

[edit] And FreeUSATax portal. Solar cone today?

semtra | 22 hours ago

Bro im tryin to sideload and everytime i try to verify my app it doesnt let me what is even going on like i need my spotify back when will the certificates be back up what else can i use to sideload

erkanerol | 22 hours ago

Why is all green in the status page? Really really annoying.

colinbartlett | 19 hours ago

The Apple status pages (both of them) are some of the worst of the big league offenders, perhaps second only to Microsoft.

Full disclosure, I operate a product that compares official outage acknowledgment to actual outage impact times. (Which I won't mention to avoid self-promotion.)

For this specific incident, I saw the alert come across my Slack at 19:02 UTC. We received over 100 reports of this outage before the official acknowledgement was posted by Apple on their status page at 21:37 UTC.

Shortly after their acknowledgment, the reports fizzled out and then Apple marked the incident as resolved about 20 minute later.

The whole outage lasted about 4 hours from first report to last and wasn't acknowledged by Apple until 3.5 hours into it.

navigate8310 | 13 hours ago

What's worse is when some service providers simply post a resolved message that is not linked to any outage.

: fragmede | 13 hours ago
That you experienced. There's tons of things to complain about, vendors being over communicative shouldn't be one of them.

tariksune | 21 hours ago

updated that there was an outage on app store connect https://developer.apple.com/system-status/

edit: working now

avicado0o | 21 hours ago

Finally WORKING!!

: [OP] strongpigeon | 21 hours ago
Confirmed! Damn that was annoying.

ollin | 19 hours ago

Here was the developer thread https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/818403 I found with lots of other reports of "Unable to Verify App - An internet connection is required to verify the trust of the developer".

Although https://developer.apple.com/system-status/ was green for most of the 3-4 hour outage, the page now at least acknowledges two minutes of downtime:

    App Store Connect - Resolved Outage
    Today, 12:04 AM - 12:06 AM
    All users were affected
    Users experienced a problem with this service.

Not a great developer experience.

: cube00 | 15 hours ago
Can't risk those precious 9s of uptime.

Orellius | 19 hours ago

And I was surprised why nothing worked, now I know. read comments here system is down hard.

benn67 | 17 hours ago

I’m in the 2 hours wasted club. Could have been worse.

curioussavage | 17 hours ago

Someone on the relevant dev team needs to fix that error message!!

So frustrating to get an error that is obviously wrong. Handle your error cases properly guys. It makes you look like amateurs.

testfrequency | 11 hours ago

Oh my god I’m so happy I caught this, even if it’s resolved.

I was pulling my hair out yesterday, kept checking the ppq site and was getting valid returns, but was in a doom loop of not being able to validate my certs. Issued 2 new ones before giving up.

As mentioned by others, frustratingly zero acknowledgment from Apple.