Apple tells developers it’s rolling out a fix for iCloud syncing issues impacting third-party apps

Earlier this week, 9to5Mac reported on major issues with iCloud syncing and CloudKit that have been plaguing third-party applications. Now, some affected developers say that they have heard from Apple that the issues have been fixed, with some additional details on what happened to initially cause the problems.

As we explained in our original report on Monday, third-party applications that rely on cloud infrastructure for syncing and other tasks have faced numerous issues over the last several months. These issues oftentimes resulted in an error message reading “Service unavailable” citing that the “Request failed with HTTP Status Code 503.” 

Developers who spoke to 9to5Mac say that Apple reached out to them to confirm that the iCloud syncing issues have been fixed. The company didn’t explain exactly what the underlying issue was, but it did acknowledge that the problem led to users seeing “Service Unavailable (Error 503)” messages.

Apple briefly elaborated that the errors typically occur when request-throttling kicks in for a specific user, but a bug was seemingly impacting this safeguard that resulted in a higher-than-usual number of errors. Apple is reportedly still in the process of reaching out to developers about the fix, so it’s possible the improvements are still rolling out.

9to5Mac’s Take

Apple has still not publicly commented on the situation, which affected a number of major third-party applications. Some developers were even forced to go as far as disabling iCloud syncing altogether and creating custom in-app status boards to show users if iCloud was experiencing issues.

Ideally, Apple will make some sort of statement publicly sooner rather than later. Third-party developers have largely been taking the blame for this iCloud syncing problems, despite the fact that the ball has been in Apple’s court to fix.

Have you noticed any improvements in iCloud syncing within third-party applications this week? Let us know down in the comments.

Also: iCloud is still experiencing a handful of other issues as of the publication of this story, including iCloud Backup outages, Photos downtime, and much more. These issues are independent of the CloudKit backend improvements that Apple has promised developers today.