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Apple.com down after iPhone announcement

Post-iPhone announcement outage at Apple.com follows live-blogging problems during the event. The Apple Store is taken down intentionally, as usual.

Elinor Mills Former Staff Writer
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service and the Associated Press.
Elinor Mills
2 min read
This is the message visitors to apple.com saw during the outage.
This is the message visitors to Apple.com saw during the outage. Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET

Apple fans who had trouble accessing live blogs of the Let's Talk iPhone event on news sites today were further frustrated when they couldn't access Apple's own site.


With all the anticipation that surrounded this event (though many people found the news to be a bit of a letdown) and Apple.com being one of the 10 most popular sites on the planet, you'd think that the company would have been prepared for increased traffic to the site today. Nevertheless, the site was been down sporadically shortly after the iPhone event ended.

While visitors to the Apple Store site at the time of the high-profile event saw a customary "We'll be back soon" message for a while this morning, visitors to Apple.com were seeing a warning that said, "Access Denied. You don't have permission to access 'http://www.apple.com/' on this server."

The problem seemed to be fixed after about an hour or so. It's unclear what happened. Apple representatives did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

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On Twitter, the topic "Access Denied" was trending, reaching one of the top 10 trends on for San Francisco and Los Angeles, along with numerous other Apple announcement-related topics.

Akamai, a content delivery provider for Apple, provided this comment to CNET: "We are aware of reported problems with certain Web sites but can't comment on specific customers. The Akamai platform isn't experiencing any issues."

Meanwhile, concerns that domains for Apple (along with Google, Microsoft and others) had been hacked were dismissed by some reports as the result of a trick known as "whois spam," which is not new.

Apple's outage was a trending topic on Twitter today.
Apple's outage was a trending topic on Twitter today. CNET/CBSinteractive