Apple finally made its USB thumb drive version of Mac OS X Lion available in the Apple Store yesterday. And for those of you taking a trip to the online Apple Store today to buy your copy of Lion, you might have noticed that the store’s website was MIA for most of the morning. For some time a visit to http://store.apple.com only returned an error page.
Multiple outlets reported the site being down earlier today, and we confirmed it with downforeveryoneorjustme.com as well as istheapplestoredown.de (who else?). However, the site then updated with the “We’re Updating the Store” message. This gave us reason to think that Apple may be releasing a new product, since that’s usually the case when that message appears.
The site was still down worldwide around 11:10am EST without any update message. Instead, as you can see from the photo above, all we were getting was a browser timeout. Thoughts quickly turned to the possibility that the Apple site had been hacked. Perhaps one of the hacktivist groups like Anonymous or LulzSec had set forth a denial of service attack.
If not a hack, it’s possible that Apple was just having technical problems. Or, could this be Apple gearing up to release a new product, and if so, what will it be? We know the next-gen iPhone is coming, but it would be pretty unlikely that it would just show up on the page without a formal announcement. Plus, rumors say that we’ll hear the announcement in September and will see the phone in October. Are they dropping the price of the iPods and saving the September event just for the iPhone?
Update: The site is back up, as of 11:20 a.m. EST, but as far as we can tell, there are no new products in the Apple Store. We’ll keep scouting around and update you with more info as it comes.
Update 2: Gizmodo just noted in a tweet that this was simply a server malfunction. The store was down for 3 hours and 46 minutes in total.
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