Why? There's really no reason to think that. Of all of the things that can go wrong - power, equipment, network, etc - you pick 'security breach'... Not impossible.. but not the most likely either.
If something goes down without warning and there's no response from the organization about why it's down or when it will be back up, security incident is a natural line of thinking. Especially considering it is Apple, they'll likely keep quiet until they know exactly what is going on and how they will resolve it before saying anything on the matter.
If it was just power or network, they'd have it back online pretty quick. This seems like they're taking time to investigate something.
If it was a breech, whether we hear something about it depends on what was accessed and what California's laws have to say about data breech notification requirements.
Note that the AWS writeup above didn't get published until a week after the incident. Maybe they don't know enough of what is going on yet (hence why it is an outage in the first place, because something is breaking in unknown ways) and they are focusing on fixing it vs. tweeting status updates without any useful info every 15 minutes...
Silence really doesn't imply anything except that the responsible parties are busy fixing things and that there may not be hands free/allocated to communicate with the outside world.
IMO not communicating with the outside world is a fail, but I've seen delays in this when small teams suddenly get swamped.
PR isn't the best department to post updates regarding technical issues. The technical people who understand the issue are, and they are possibly busy fixing the problem right now.
OTOH they outsource a lot. From the people I've talked to at vendors "they (Apple) just don't fucking care" is what I've been hearing on this incident, which makes me think it's nothing technically interesting.
> I'd think that Apple would be happy to tell us it was a simple power/network failure were that the case.
Really? With the multi-region AWS failure, Amazon was very reluctant to even confirm it was happening for a while, and didn't explain it for weeks afterwards.
> Sudden shutdown of vital service + silence = most likely a security prob.
Or alternatively, "oops, how much customer data have we accidentally irreparably destroyed?!" IIRC in the aforementioned AWS incident Amazon only really started talking when they had an idea of how many EBS volumes were irreparably corrupt.
Should have redundancy. You'd expected it to. But mistakes happen. I recall an incident where a data center found out that their two "redundant" incoming utility power feeds were really wired to the same source only when the power failed.
