Apple's macOS Big Sur System Server Outage and Its Aftermath
TapTechNews August 12th news, shortly after Apple released the macOS Big Sur system in 2020, it encountered a large-scale server outage event. This outage affected macOS installations, iMessage, Apple Pay, and especially the application notarization service. This means that users encountered major problems when opening applications, exposing the defect in Apple's Mac application verification.
According to TapTechNews' understanding, every time an application is launched, the Mac conducts several verification checks. One of them is to verify whether the application is malicious software, and the other is to ensure that the developer certificate associated with the application is still valid. These checks are designed to protect user safety and are often called application notarization.
Normally, if the user's Mac is offline, the check will fail but the application can still start normally. However, in this server outage event, macOS still tried to connect to the server for the check instead of just failing directly, resulting in extremely slow application startup times.
After the incident, Apple announced a series of changes to solve the problem, including allowing users to completely opt out of online notarization checks. These changes were originally scheduled to be launched in 2021.
Initially, Apple announced these improvements because people were worried whether the company was using the notarization process to collect data on users' use of applications. The company reaffirmed that this is not the case and emphasized some upcoming changes in the support documentation:
In order to further protect privacy, we have stopped recording the IP address associated with the developer ID certificate check and will ensure that any collected IP addresses are removed from the logs.
In addition, in the next year, we will introduce several changes to our security checks:
A new encryption protocol for the developer ID certificate revocation check
Strong protection against server failures
A new preference for users to opt out of these security protections
It is worthy of recognition that Apple did implement some of the promised changes, such as stopping the collection of IP addresses and creating a new encryption protocol for the developer ID certificate check.
However, there is still no news about the option to completely opt out of online notarization checks. In addition, all references to this function in the support documentation were completely deleted at some point in the past year.
It seems that Apple has cancelled the plan to allow users to open applications without any form of online security check in advance. Apple may have made other underlying changes to macOS to ensure that server outages will no longer prevent applications from starting normally, but Apple needs to clearly state their plans.