Apple updates Developer Portal status, adds system status page

Apple has pushed out an update to their Developer Portal maintenance page{.nofollow} to give developers some additional information about the current status of things in the wake of their security breach. The update announces the order in which developers can expect services and functionality to be restored.

We plan to roll out our updated systems, starting with Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles, Apple Developer Forums, Bug Reporter, pre-release developer libraries, and videos first. Next, we will restore software downloads, so that the latest betas of iOS 7, Xcode 5, and OS X Mavericks will once again be available to program members. We’ll then bring the remaining systems online. To keep you up to date on our progress, we’ve created a status page to display the availability of our systems.

First will come update systems of Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles, developer forums, Bug Reporter, pre-release developer libraries and videos. After that will come software downloads, including betas for iOS 7, Xcode 5 and OS X Mavericks. Finally, the remaining systems, which aren't clearly specified, will come back online.

To make it easy to see which services have come back up, Apple has also put up a system status page to clearly show the current online/offline status of all of their developer systems.

The inability to generate new certificates or add new devices to profiles has been a block for some developers who either have expired certificates or need to add new devices to their account for development and beta testing. Apple prioritizing this as one of the first systems to come back up will hopefully mean those developers can get back to business as usual soon. And with Apple's Developer Forums being the only channel where developers can legally discuss software still under Apple's non-disclosure agreement (read iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks), their prioritization also makes sense.

While it might seem somewhat strange that software downloads for iOS 7, Xcode 5, and OS X Mavericks were not prioritized in the first group, Apple has already released an update to the OS X Mavericks beta through the App Store for developers who already had a previous version install. If Apple is able to do the same for iOS 7 and Xcode, it seems reasonable that the direct software downloads may not be as urgent.

Apple's Bug Reporter is also mentioned as one of the first systems that will update, but the bug reporting site didn't go down like the rest of the Developer Portal; it has stayed up the entire time. It's unclear if Apple's aforementioned update refers to back-end changes to address security issues that will be transparent to users, or if it may refer to something bigger like a completely overhauled interface, like the one that made a brief appearance last month.