The Great Apple ID Snafu of 2015 is over.
And it apparently cost Apple about US$25 million in lost sales revenue.
Over the course of a 12-hour outage between Tuesday and Wednesday, Apple’s iTunes Store and App Store were down due to a DNS error. During this time, users couldn’t purchase apps, songs, movies or books. It took Apple 12 hours to get their systems up and running again, costing the company about US$25 million in lost sales.
Apple customers weren’t able to connect to the iTunes Store, App Store, Mac App Store, iBookstore, or iCloud for about half of Wednesday thanks to the internal problem. Apple commented on the issue after several hours of downtime with the following statement:
“The cause was an internal DNS error at Apple. We’re working to make all of the services available to customers as soon as possible, and we thank everyone for their patience.”
During the unintentional 12-hour blackout, customers couldn’t purchase apps, books, or other content, and that equates to lost money. Based on the US$18.5 billion Apple brought in from those services last year, that breaks down to about US$50 million a day. At half a day, that’s US$25 million—assuming sales haven’t increased at all this year, which they likely have.
Since iPhone and iPad apps are available only through the App Store, and many Mac developers offer their products only through the Mac App Store, any down time has to hurt. Some users wanting to buy apps will try again now that Apple’s services are back up and running, but developers won’t be able to make up all of the sales they lost yesterday.
Considering this is the primary source of revenue for many developers, keeping the App Store and Mac App Store running reliably is a pretty big deal. With any luck, this won’t happen again too soon.
Via The Mac Observer
3 replies on “Apple ID errors end, lost sales for App Store, iTunes Store estimated around $25 million”
RT @JasonOGrady: Apple ID errors end, lost sales for App Store, iTunes Store estimated around $25 million http://t.co/Ag0zoo3mQE
@JasonOGrady Yes, my game was launched 20min. prior shutdown. So, there is my $$ in this $25million 🙂
“At half a day, that’s US$25 million”
That assumes that the product desired was available on another site/service. Even if they were Apple online customers, by and large, do not shop other sites to satisfy instant gratification wants/needs. How many iTunes shoppers delayed their purchase for 24 hours is unknowable, but I’d wager well more than half (and probably win),
The amount of iTunes sales lost to competing services during that 12 hour outage was most likely far less than a third of the amount bandied about. For Apple’s competitors a single day loss of that magnitude would be extraordinary. For Apple it didn’t even cause a ripple. I’m sure Apple was far more concerned with the PR damage the outage caused, than the actual $ value of those sales.