Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

Apple (News - Alert)'s suite of digital stores, including iTunes and the App Store, went down for a full 12 hours last week — resulting in millions in lost revenue.

The global outage is estimated to have cost up to $25 million — a major hit for the Internet giant. The culprit? A Web issue. Specifically, a DNS error, which could be the result of high latency due to volume, or could be caused by improper configuration on Apple’s servers.

The widespread disruption in service was a rare hiccup for Apple, but managed to affect users worldwide who were unable to access several of Apple's major properties. It started with iCloud—users on the East Coast were unable to sign in to their iCloud mail accounts, and then the entire service went down for a few hours. Then, iTunes Connect and iTunes, the App Store, the Mac App Store and the iBooks Store all went on the fritz.

When attempting to make a purchase or download a free app, a message appeared simply saying that users weren’t able to connect to the stores. "Customers may be unable to make purchases from the App Store, iTunes Store, iBooks Store, or Mac App Store," a message on Apple's status page read.

According to Apple’s financials, revenue from those stores and other services averages $50 million per day, meaning up to $25 million was potentially lost.

"We apologize to our customers experiencing problems with iTunes and other services this morning," Neumayr said in an e-mailed statement to media. "The cause was an internal DNS error at Apple. We're working to make all of the services available to customers as soon as possible, and we thank everyone for their patience."

The outage may have been Web-related, but it points out the effect that even a short amount of downtime can have on a company’s bottom line. Back-up DNS servers combined with battery back-up (using an uninterruptible power supply, or UPS) to bring those servers online quickly could have headed Apple’s issues off at the pass, if the surface information is correct. Whether backing up a desktop workstation or an entire facility (or digital store) the lesson is clear: always have a Plan B.