iTunes servers appear to be wonky today

I didn't know iTunes was powered by Amazon EC2...

I can confirm that the Apple Retail Stores (actual physical stores) were impacted as they were using clipboards and printed paper lists of Genius bar appointments and trying to squeeze walk ins to the schedule because they could no longer check the schedule nor confirm people who just scheduled an appointment. They normally used iPads to do that sort of thing. I believe they were able to take your money and sell you things but they couldn't perform many functions electronically and the Genius bar was backing up because it took longer to process everything by hand.

Now, I have worked retail before and had the power go out for hours. It's a pain in the neck to run a cash register log on a notepad and pencil. So I felt for them.

Whatever happened to the Apple servers it was a big outage that impacted all their Retail stores plus all the online systems. Must have been some large SAN system or database cluster that completely died, etc. Typically, outages don't take that long unless it was something huge and too expensive to fully be redundant. Or it was just a tricky problem that was hard to identify and find the root cause. i.e. you start trying to bring things back up and they just go down again, etc. I've worked issues like that in enterprise data centers and I've seen some really weird things happen. Sometimes you end up going down a different path because errors are pointing at one problem when the real problem is entirely different. Any large complex system with interacting parts can be rather difficult to repair depending on what part fails.

I can't access my Game Center account. It shows the message "Could not connect to Game Center server."

In Los Angeles, CA it took over an hour to activate my iPhone 4 (AT&T) and the same for my roommate on his iPhone 4 (Verizon).

Same problems here in Afghanistan... The one day I make it back to the fob, I can't login to my email and check emails from everyone back in the states... Psch... Good going Apple... Now gotta wait until after deployment to get my emails...

So to give you all all a little background from the retail side. All our systems that required a login were down. Time clock, the appointment system, the system applecare uses to verify info about your computer even the job listing page wasn't working. my guess is that the Apple ID and AppleConnect systems went down.

I got problems downloading iphone update, in Mexico!

Got the same messages here in the UK.

When I tried to update Foursquare and Facebook, it wouldn't update, but it also moved my icons out of the folder they were in and it moved them to the last page of apps I had...very strange.

For what it's worth (and this may have been reported previously), Apple's Mail service was a little wonky yesterday as well.