Marco.org

We apologize that maintenance is taking longer than expected.

It’s now been almost three full days. I don’t know anything about their infrastructure, but for a web service to be down this long with so little communication, most “maintenance” or migration theories become very unlikely.

The most likely explanations:

1. Severe data loss, with trouble restoring from backups. While this can happen to the best of us, I don’t think it’s very likely to have happened here. Also, three days is pretty long even for backup-restoring troubles.
2. A security breach, followed by cleanup and increased defenses. The longer it goes, especially with no statements to the contrary, the more this becomes the most likely explanation.

Apple IDs have been working normally, so if it was a security breach, it’s more likely specific to one of the roles of the Developer Center: forums (boring), beta downloads (boring), developer identity (creepy but maybe profitable), or device provisioning and certificates (potentially very profitable). If a root certificate somewhere was compromised, this could mean having to immediately generate new certificates for development, or more pressingly, push notifications or iCloud.

Either way, if you’re an iOS or Mac App Store developer, I’d suggest leaving some free time in the schedule this week until we know what happened to the Developer Center.