Tell HN: Apple development certificate server seems down?

I don't see anything on https://developer.apple.com/system-status/, but I haven't been able to install apps for development on my own devices starting at 11AM PDT.

Other people on Reddit seem to be hitting this too [0]. Anyone knows anything about it?

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/comments/1rq4uxl

Edit: Now getting intermittent 502s from https://ppq.apple.com/. Something is definitely going on.

108 points | by strongpigeon 2 days ago

13 comments

  • xutopia 2 days ago
    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/

    [-]
    • rendaw 1 day 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 1 day 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 1 day 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 1 day 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.
    • ToucanLoucan 2 days 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.

      [-]
    • andyvanosdale 1 day ago
      It's definitely not worse than GitHub being down...
      [-]
      • _heimdall 1 day 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 1 day 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 1 day 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 1 day 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 1 day 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 1 day ago
          Can’t you still test on simulator
          [-]
          • cyberax 1 day 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 1 day 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
  • ollin 1 day 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 1 day ago
      Can't risk those precious 9s of uptime.
  • gt565k 2 days 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.

    [-]
  • strongpigeon 2 days ago
    I'm getting invalid certificates from https://ppq.apple.com. I think that's probably the root cause?
    [-]
    • gt565k 2 days ago
      Hilarious... their provisioning profile query server has an expired SSL certificate?

      Are you serious Apple?

      [-]
      • strongpigeon 2 days 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
        [-]
      • xutopia 2 days 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!
    • astrostl 2 days ago
      [flagged]
      [-]
      • strongpigeon 2 days ago
        That's fair. I've never attempted to reach this before so I can't compare and the explanation makes sense.

        The intermittent 502s on the other hand are an issue.

  • erkanerol 1 day ago
    Why is all green in the status page? Really really annoying.
    [-]
    • colinbartlett 1 day 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 1 day ago
        What's worse is when some service providers simply post a resolved message that is not linked to any outage.
        [-]
        • fragmede 1 day ago
          That you experienced. There's tons of things to complain about, vendors being over communicative shouldn't be one of them.
  • curioussavage 1 day 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 1 day 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.

  • avicado0o 1 day ago
    Finally WORKING!!
    [-]
  • ynac 2 days 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?

  • tariksune 1 day ago
    updated that there was an outage on app store connect https://developer.apple.com/system-status/

    edit: working now

  • benn67 1 day ago
    I’m in the 2 hours wasted club. Could have been worse.
  • Orellius 1 day ago
    And I was surprised why nothing worked, now I know. read comments here system is down hard.
  • semtra 1 day 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