Earlier this week, Apple announced that their Developer Center, which has been offline since July 18, had suffered a security breach, and would remain offline while Apple works toward “overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database to prevent such an issue from arising again.
Today, the company has posted a public update on their developer site, and has sent an email to all developers notifying them of their plans to slowly bring the developer system back online. Further, the company has also posted a status page, allowing users to stay up-to-date on when various elements of the system are put back online.
From the e-mail (the email and the message on their developer site are identical):
We apologize for the significant inconvenience caused by our developer website downtime. We’ve been working around the clock to overhaul our developer systems, update our server software, and rebuild our entire database. While we complete the work to bring our systems back online, we want to share the latest with you.
We plan to roll out our updated systems, starting with Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles, Apple Developer Forums, Bug Reporter, pre-release developer libraries, and videos first. Next, we will restore software downloads, so that the latest betas of iOS 7, Xcode 5, and OS X Mavericks will once again be available to program members. We’ll then bring the remaining systems online. To keep you up to date on our progress, we’ve created a status page to display the availability of our systems.
If your program membership is set to expire during this period, it will be extended and your app will remain on the App Store. If you have any other concerns about your account, please contact us.
Thank you for your continued patience.
Despite the Developer Center outage, Apple has still managed to release pre-release developer updates for both OS X Mavericks Developer Preview and OS X 10.8.5, although iOS 7 was not updated – Apple had posted the first several betas exactly two weeks apart, breaking their pattern by not releasing a fourth beta this Monday.
It’s great to hear that Apple is “working around the clock” to get their developer portal in order, although it remains unclear exactly how long it will take to have the entire system online and fully operational once more. With any luck, it’ll happen sooner rather than later!
