Post Mortem: App Store Outage on January 24th, 2020

On January 24th, the App Store experienced a significant disruption when the verifyReceipt endpoint failed for about five hours, preventing developers from validating in-app purchases and causing approximately half a million failed transactions. This incident led to numerous user complaints, negative reviews, and financial losses for developers. RevenueCat, a company focused on handling payment issues for developers, monitored the situation and eventually deployed a temporary solution to unlock content access via their entitlements system. However, the company acknowledged shortcomings in their response, particularly in their reporting and mitigation strategies, and plans to improve their incident response processes by setting up alerts for anomalous error codes and implementing their own receipt validation system. Despite the challenges, RevenueCat is committed to enhancing their reliability and ensuring developers can focus on their products rather than payment issues.