Digital rights management ‘blunder’ leads to users having to delete and reinstall every app they bought or downloaded from App Store

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Mac users faced trouble with their apps overnight after the security certificate Apple uses to prevent piracy expired late on Wednesday.

Applications downloaded from the Mac App Store were temporarily unavailable from 10pm UK time, when a security certificate expired, five years after its creation, with no replacement immediately available.

Even once Apple fixed the error, issuing a new certificate for the apps (with an expiry date of April 2035, this time), users were still faced with problems. Those who could not connect to the internet couldn’t verify the new certificate, while those who had forgotten their password or couldn’t log in to iCloud for some other reason are also unable to use the downloaded apps until they can log in to the service.

Some were forced to delete and then reinstall every app they had bought or downloaded from the App Store, before they could be used, taking to Twitter to vent their frustrations.

Graham (@greyham) Uh, Apple, why are a bunch of my Mac App Store apps suddenly “damaged”?! pic.twitter.com/Afby6j5VtS

Graeme Devine (@zaphodgjd) Mac App Store is down for auth so no apps will run. This is a customer service nightmare when you are the small company with the #1 game.

The cause of the outage was first highlighted by Paul Haddad, a developer at Mac and iOS software house Tapbots, who discovered the out-of-date security certificate late on Wednesday night:

Paul Haddad (@tapbot_paul) Well that would explain the MAS problem. pic.twitter.com/Nuqj9Uxxiz

Security certificates are issued by the App Store to ensure that only apps properly bought and paid for can be run on users’ Macs, as well as to guard against the installation of malware using Apple’s developer credentials.

Apple did not respond to request for comment.