14 DAY TRIAL // The computer giant at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA has confirmed the reason behind the Dev Center downtime this past weekend by releasing a public letter to registered developers worldwide.
In the letter Apple states that, as early as last Thursday, “an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers from our developer website.”
Although this personal information is encrypted and cannot be accessed, Apple says, “we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed.”
Wanting to be open on the issue, Apple decided to inform the masses via this open letter and went as far as to take down the site to carry out maintenance.
“In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you of the issue. We took the site down immediately on Thursday and have been working around the clock since then,” Apple states.
Apple is making radical changes to its backend in order to keep developers’ information secure, and that includes completely rebuilding its database.
“In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database,” the letter reads.
Apple is apologetic about the matter, but doesn’t provide an exact timeframe for the maintenance period. All it says is that its developer portal should be back in working condition in the near future.
“We apologize for the significant inconvenience that our downtime has caused you and we expect to have the developer website up again soon,” the letter ends.
Some developers have been unable to submit updates or entirely new applications, while others haven’t been able to download the software put forth by Apple (such as the iOS 7 beta, and OS X Mavericks).
There’s some good news too. For developers whose program membership was set to expire during this period, Apple has extended it and all their apps will remain on the App Store.
Apple offers this Contact form for developers with any other concerns about their account.