Apple Partners: Widespread Service Outage Could Start To Erode Enterprise Customer Confidence

While Apple says its widespread service outage Thursday evening has been resolved, partners are concerned that their customers' trust in the vendor will erode, particularly in the enterprise.

Michael Oh, chief technology officer and founder of TSP, a Boston-based Apple partner, said he has heard nothing from his clients about the outages but is concerned about the effect on customer confidence in Apple’s cloud services.

’These outages, while not regular, can slowly erode confidence in cloud services,’ he said. ’Apple's track record so far is pretty good but they are competing with top-class cloud providers, so the bar is high. Luckily, the services impacted don't seem to be making waves with business customers but as they move more into business and enterprise, the more those customers will be sensitive to disruption.’

[Related: Widespread Outage Hits Apple Cloud]

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The issues, which appeared to have started around 4 p.m. ET on Thursday, impacted several iCloud and App Store services, as well as widely used retail and backup services, according to Apple’s status page. As of early Friday morning, all applications had resumed, and Apple said on its webpage that there were no further reported issues. The company did not provide an explanation for the service outages.

Apple, Cupertino, Calif., did not respond to a CRN request for comment by press time.

"The Apple outage yesterday was very impactful to us and our customers," said Jay Gordon, vice president of sales at Plano, Texas-based Apple partner Enterprise Mobile. "Our customers rely on us to provision, stage and configure devices before they reach the end user, driving a great out-of-box experience while ensuring corporate standards and policies are met. The outage prevented us from accessing the App Store and downloading key applications, such as mobile device management software and other content that is needed to fully configure a device. Therefore, we were not able to deploy Apple devices for our customers during the outage."

Apple has had issues with outages in the past—in May, Apple had a problem operating its cloud services when search functionality became degraded on the App Store, leaving some popular apps not discoverable, and last July, the company experienced a bevy of outages for several services, including the App Store, iTunes Store and Apple TV.

’Service outages definitely tarnish the company’s image,’ said Steven Kantorowitz, president of CelPro Associates, an Apple partner based in New York. ’What if an enterprise customer couldn’t access documents for a meeting because the iCloud service was down?’

For Kantorowitz, Apple’s incident brings back memories of an outage years ago that impacted another mobile company -- BlackBerry.

’BlackBerry had outages with its smartphones and that definitely started affecting BlackBerry enterprise customers’ view,’ he said. ’These outages had a major impact … many customers lost confidence in BlackBerry and this played into the decline of BlackBerry. Hopefully Apple doesn’t follow the same pattern.’