I love how the Apple status dashboard actually goes red when services are down. You'd think that would be easy, but most companies prefer to lie with their dashboards to meet SLOs.
If I were ever negotiating those contracts on the other side, given how we've known how people lie with these dashboards for like a decade now, I'd want to see a clause which states that if I can catch them having not updated the dashboard there is a really really serious penalty fee.
If you can build a fool-proof monitoring system that perfectly captures errors and uptime for a certain service, you can probably sell it back to them for a lot of money.
Companies can be fast and loose with their dashboards because no one can prove otherwise.
Nobody would agree to a contract where a bug in their monitoring stack or status website included a "serious penalty", even if intending to be completely honest about their status page.
The point is that nobody is going to agree to this regardless of whether they are being honest or not, because of the possibility of a bug or oversight leading to 'serious penalties'.
If a service provider wants their decision about whether to honor the SLA to be based on what the dashboard says, then it's completely fair to require that they report accurate information through that dashboard.
A service provider always has the option of providing an SLA that's based on the true uptime of the underlying service without treating the dashboard as a definitive source of truth. Choosing to make the dashboard their official record of downtime means they're opting in to having inaccuracies in the dashboard qualify as fraud.
Basically all SLAs are as you describe - I've never heard of a contract that directly bases SLAs on a status page.
The reason providers don't want to update status pages is because it provides easy ammo for customers to say "look, YOU said you were down!" even if they weren't actually affected. It effectively greenlights an SLA lapse for every single customer.
Was about to say this. Kudos to them for actually conveying the information! They seem to have learned that what they're (partially) in the business of selling is long term trust.
They're also the only laptop or phone or tablet vendor I've ever purchased from whose battery life claims are anywhere near matching actual lived reality, even for very light use.
FWIW this wasn’t always the case, I distinctly remember when they effectively announced that they would stop skewing these numbers. It was also IIRC around the time they announced they’d stop using price brackets to charge more for certain upsells depending on which base config you chose.
Good on them for both! But I remember both as admissions that they’d been dishonest or manipulative prior.
Slack the company does use Slack the product for inter-company communication. However, their Slack-inside-Slack is a relatively isolated "instance" of Slack on separate infrastructure for exactly that reason. The exact level of isolation/redundancy is not clear to me though.
Source: I asked a Slack engineer about this in-person. Maybe a real Slack employee can chime in with more info.
The most surprising service in this page is probably:
Walkie-Talkie - Available
Have you ever made it work? I activelly tried multiple times with multiple friends and the best I could get was about 3 seconds of one-directional audio, with dropped connection right after.
I've spent good 20 minutes trying to get it to work with me and my wife, but we both sent each other 'invites' that never arrived and it stayed like so since.
I was on a camping trip and we used it quite a few times just fine.
I find it weird on this thread and the other AirTags how everyone has such varying experiences with the hardware. My AirTags don't work often, everyone else's are fine. My walkie talkie works, no-one else does ...
WFM. Like a walkie talkie: you need to hold down the button while you record your message. The audio is one-way. Then the other person takes their turn.
Interesting. I woke up to find that my iCloud & App Store accounts got locked. I was able to recover my account by resetting my password though. I wonder if it's related to this outage.
Muy anecdote: could not work because mac was randomly popping up "please sign in to your apple id to use podcasts" popup, stealing focus and obscuring screen few times a minute. entering password resulted in "incorrect password" and a repeat popup. Got real strong malware vibes, did upgrade+reboot, it passed.
It’s not that weird —- if they have multiple data centers, your cell provider and home ISP may route you to different hosts. Given that they’re defining the outages as “some users” affected, it may be that only one of their DCs is seeing issues.
In addition to GeoDNS as explained by my sibling post, this can be achieved not by making the domain point to different IP addresses, but by placing multiple instances of the same IP address in different points in the network (Anycast), and which one you hit is determined by routing policy.
Some CDNs 'prefer' one approach or the other, e.g. Akamai tends to use DNS, CloudFlare tends to use Anycast, but these days most have the capability to do both or mix them as appropriate.
The dns server has multiple answers in the database and has logic to determine which one to respond with. Normally it’s based on the assume location of the client based on IP of the query but it need not be. “Geo DNS”
Try Pocket Casts too, much better for makingsure your regular Podcasts are downloaded before things go offline.
I tried switching to Apple Podcasts and I found out the hard way that it didnt download my episodes before a 10 hour flight.
Apple Music is bad with this too. Even though it's what I use for streaming, I simply do not trust it to keep things locally if it decides it might have a better idea about whether I need disk space than it does. I use Castro for podcasts (inbox/queue works great for maintaining local downloads) and Doppler for music.
Although Overcast has some infuriating UI/UX nonsense (like not remembering where you are if you swap away from the app, searches not being sorted, etc.) and some weird bugs (sometimes when you play, it'll do a couple of seconds and then stop. Might be related to a previously downloaded episode being evicted from cache but handle that properly!)
On the other hand, it's the least worst podcast app I've tried on iOS thus far.
yeah i have no idea why you can't sort the list of podcasts manually but at least i figured out you can pin the ones to the top in the (iirc) reverse order you pin them. least worst podcast app is probably the best way to put it. pretty good but definitely could be really good with some ux designer love.
