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.”
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.
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.
Regarding the recent iCloud sync issue, I received a very kind and detailed response from Apple indicating that the underlying issue causing the 503 errors/sync failures has been fixed! 🎉 (Please share!)
— Becky Hansmeyer (@bhansmeyer) January 26, 2022
