The Apple Store in Birmingham, England – one of the stores affected
Yesterday’s large-scale data outage left a number of Apple Stores in Europe offline, reports Business Insider.
For about two hours this morning, employees couldn’t check in to work, stores couldn’t make sales, and Genius Bar appointments couldn’t be kept. Employees couldn’t check email until 3 pm London time.
The issues meant that store staff were unable to use their card machines to take payments, leading stores to resort to old-fashioned mechanical paper machines (photo below) …
One UK visitor to an Apple Store in Birmingham tweeted this photo.
Store problems appeared to be limited to Europe, though the inability to login to the Apple website using Apple IDs made it impossible to make advance Genius bar appointments in US stores.
Apple blamed the outage on “an internal DNS error at Apple,” and apologized for the inconvenience.
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Good thing Katie Cotton has left, otherwise we’d get the usual “we don’t normally disclose…”
with all due respect, I know a little about how Corporate PR works and many times, they are just the spokesperson and they are being told what to say to the media and typically it’s the attorneys and sometimes other people in upper management that are the people that tell PR what they can say, not say, etc. Or it may have been Jobs himself that told her what to say or not say. Many times PR is just the voice, but not the initiator of the words being communicated. They may create the words, but legal department many times edits what they can say. It typical in any large company.
I’m just going from past experience working with a publicly traded company and PR on some press releases.
” . . . DNS Error” – Hacked? ;)
iTunes radio went off on me.
What causes a DNS error?
Overloaded DNS server from incoming TCP (HTML) requests… could be hack like a DNS or could be just popular. I think considering this week was Spring Forward, everyone is browsing the goods.
Apple Stores are the only place I know where they completely lose the ability to function, and people will still line up to give them money.
Once the power went out at the Apple Store I worked in. Completely out, the whole mall was out of service for a couple of hours. “Can I still buy this?”