Apple Developer Site Finally Back Online

Following three weeks of downtime, the Apple developer website is finally in working order once again. Five days ago, Apple announced that the developer services would be restored by the end of the week and they appear to have met that goal.

Developers have been unable to edit and update their applications for three weeks the Developer site due to an outage. Although Apple was responsible for taking the site offline, they announced that it was in response to a hacker who had compromised the site on July 18.

Apple did acknowledge that the hacker may have been able to collect some data during the attack such as email addressees and names of developers but all sensitive information was not compromised as it is located in a different area.

No one has been named as the definitive cause of the attack but a researcher did come forward to the media to state that he was responsible. However, his story did not match up with Apple’s. According to the researcher, he was simply going into the site and was able to find and report 16 bugs to Apple.

Whether or not the researchers’ claims are true has not been verified by Apple who has stayed relatively quiet about the entire situation. Some developer services including downloads were brought back online prior to the full restoration. From what we can tell, the site was taken down as a result of the bugs that the researcher found and exposed, rather than a hacker trying to gain access to information.

The majority of important services were accessible on July 26, less than two weeks after the outage began. The outage primarily caused delays for developers that are currently trying to develop applications for iOS 7. Without easy access to the developer versions of the new iOS betas, developing new software was more difficult.