Apple.com Goes Dark, Conspiracy Theorists Unite

Published on 10-14-2009 04:47 AM

Image via AfterDawn.com

This morning I found myself reading the Washington Post online and stumbling across how Apple's website actually went dark last night. Personally, I didn't notice. But according to MG Siegler of Tech Crunch in a piece carried by the Post, a "big boy" crashed last night.

No, I'm not talking about the Apple Store being taken down for its routine maintenance. I'm talking about the entire site being down, returning a "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" error for about 15 minutes now.

A crash for Apple isn't an every day occurrence. Using Akamai to serve the website and its content, the Apple site was down everywhere, according to Siegler who quickly ran some tests. Typically, when Apple turns off the lights its because a major change or update is coming.

Well, that didn't happen. But it certainly is making people wonder what's up.

That's fairly crazy, and likely points to a an original source server error not on Akamai's end. But still, you'd think Akamai would have have a cache to serve rather than an error.

Since looking into the matter myself, I have already encountered more than just a handful of conspiracy theorists who say there's something rotten in Denmark. Was Apple.com intentionally taken down last night for a reason yet to be made public? I have no answers to report on that front, only the questions I am hearing from others.

Let's break out those conspiracy theories. I blame Twitter.

In and of itself, the outage isn't major news, but as major media outlets and other blogs continue to reported it, a "big story" has been made of a brief glitch that probably holds no significance or untold secrets.

Of course, if you think I'm wrong, please weigh in on the matter and let us know why you think differently.

_{This article was originally published in forum thread:
Apple.com Goes Dark, Conspiracy Theorists Unite
started by
Michael Essany} _{View original post}

24 Comments

eZStaR - 10-14-2009, 05:12 AM

Apple.com actually went down? Umm.
Yea well, some error I suppose, not a big deal to get so worked up about.
Some people will just go around making false accusations and dumb people will believe them...
I mean really so what if the site went down, Server failed so what o_o.
Simply there is no Conspiracy, otherwise if there was, apple would have said something to the public.
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sonyman74 - 10-14-2009, 05:48 AM

Well, I say nothing can work 100% all the time.
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FlexSurferOne - 10-14-2009, 05:59 AM

Yup! I totally agree with eZStaR.
Peoples get hyped up so easily for simple things theses days, and alot other believe what they read on the internet
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elite_jounin - 10-14-2009, 06:07 AM

Correct me if i'm wrong but TECHNOLOGY DOES fail, does it not?!
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LittleJob - 10-14-2009, 06:18 AM

Looks like this is new? Or did i miss out on this?

Apple's Recycling Program?
Apple - Recycling Program
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billchase2 - 10-14-2009, 07:15 AM

Originally Posted by LittleJob

Looks like this is new? Or did i miss out on this?

Apple's Recycling Program?
Apple - Recycling Program

I've never noticed that before. Either way, it's a great idea!
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prootZ - 10-14-2009, 09:33 AM

Originally Posted by Messany

Since looking into the matter myself, I have already encountered more than just a handful of conspiracy theorists who say there's something rotten in Denmark

What's in Denmark?
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Davisman - 10-14-2009, 09:35 AM

Sounds like someone tripped over a power cord. Nothing is perfect.
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waroftyr - 10-14-2009, 09:58 AM

try the weather, here in cupertino we dont get a whole lot of big storms with high winds that cause power outages. obviously bad enough that my college less than a mile from apple had to shut down for power outages. no news here.
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rhammouda - 10-14-2009, 10:38 AM

My guess is that the hiccup was likely due to microsoft finally deciding to just take over apple instead of endlessly battling them:

Phase one: Web takeover

Phase two: Steve Jobs will be replaced with Microsoft made android.

We can probably expect a large decrease in Jobs' rhetorical skills at the next MacWorld
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lom51 - 10-14-2009, 10:56 AM

when apples HQ blows up ill be interested till then the roumors are nothing but a huge snore fest
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RonHC - 10-14-2009, 12:08 PM

Microsoft did it
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extremzocker - 10-14-2009, 12:19 PM

thats my avatar
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e10100 - 10-14-2009, 01:13 PM

Sometimes things just break down and need to be fixed... Thats how the world works..
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etaxero - 10-14-2009, 03:04 PM

I would say the real reason so many people get all antsy when something like the Apple website goes down is because of simple standards used by corporations, redundancy. Everything has a backup and some backups even have backups. If a server fails another picks up the slack, I doubt the entire apple website is hosted on a single server, single harddrive, or even single connection. That would be some crazy good equipment to be able to handle the load!

So if a company ever goes down it is either because they meant to, they were hacked and forced down, or a lot of things went wrong at once. This is why you get conspiracy theorists crawling out of the wood work HOPING something exciting is about to happen.
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