Attempting to watch Apple’s live stream yesterday from Cupertino was an exercise in frustration, at least for the first half of the event. First there were multiple music tracks before the event started, then the stream went to a test pattern multiple times, followed by a Chinese-language translation speaking over the Apple execs, with several restarts of the stream, poor resolution and error messages mixed in.
The stream was working by the time the Apple Watch was unveiled, but the problems persisted for most of the iPhone 6 unveiling.
So what happened? Streaming experts and web developers are having a field day with that question, with much of the attention focused on this analysis by Dan Rayburn of StreamingMedia.com.
In short, Rayburn says Apple’s site was torpedoed by the way its developers adjusted for the interactive images and social media posts that appeared on the event page, preventing the site from being properly cached.
Another problem, he says, was Apple’s misconfiguration of its content storage on Amazon Web Services’ S3 service.
Looking at the metadata from the event page, you could see that Apple was hosting content from the interactive element on the apple.com event page on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service. From what I can tell, it looks like Apple setup the content in a single bucket on S3 with little to no cache hit ratio, with poor bucket configuration. Amazon didn’t reply to my request for more info, but it’s clear that Apple didn’t setup their S3 storage correctly, which caused huge performance issues when all the requests hit Amazon’s network in a single location.
In the comments on the post, however, a wide variety of web developers are challenging Rayburn’s analysis, citing other evidence including the fact that the AppleTV stream was also having major problems.
Whatever the cause, the glitch appears to be the one major hiccup for Apple on a day that saw the unveiling of bigger iPhones, the new Apple Pay system, and the Apple Watch.
For anyone who wants to watch a clean video of the presentation, it’s archived here. Also see our full rundown and recap.
In the meantime, this thing is quickly becoming an Internet meme. Here’s a tweet from Denny’s Diner.
— Denny’s (@DennysDiner) September 9, 2014
