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Mac users started encountering unexpected issues on Thursday, including apps taking a few minutes to launch, stuttering and non-responsiveness in macOS, and other issues. The problems seemed to start around the time Apple started rolling out the new version of macOS, Big Sur, but it affected users of other versions of macOS, like Catalina and Mojave.
Other Apple services have also experienced slowdowns, crashes, and weird behavior, including Apple Pay, Messages, and even Apple TV devices.
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This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for tech news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED’s parent company, Condé Nast.
It didn’t take long for some Mac users to notice that trustd – a macOS process responsible for checking with Apple’s servers to confirm that an app is notarized – was trying to contact a host named ocsp.apple.com but repeatedly failed. This resulted in system-wide slowdowns as applications attempted to launch, among other things.
Users who opened the console and filtered for the error encountered many successive errors related to trustd.
The affected hostname (which is actually just a pointer to a whole bunch of servers on Apple’s CDN) is responsible for validating all kinds of Apple-related cryptographic certificates, including certificates used by the notarization of applications. First introduced in Mojave and made mandatory in Catalina, notarization is an automated process that Apple performs on software signed by developers:
Apple Notary Service is an automated system that scans your software for malicious content, checks for code signing issues, and returns the results to you quickly. If there is no problem, the notary service generates a ticket that you can staple to your software; the notary service also publishes this ticket online where Gatekeeper can find it.
The “OCSP” part of the hostname refers to stapling the online certificate status protocol, or simply “stapling the certificate”. Apple uses certificate stapling to help streamline the process of checking millions and millions of certificates for validity by millions of Apple devices every day.
When an Apple device cannot connect to the network but you still want to launch an app, the notarization validation is supposed to “fail soft”, that is, your Apple device is supposed to recognize that you are not online and allow the app to launch anyway. However, due to the nature of what happened today, calls to the server just seemed to hang instead of fail smoothly. This may be because everyone’s device could still perform a DNS lookup on ocsp.apple.com without any issues, which led devices to believe that if they could do a DNS lookup, they should be able to connect to the OCSP service. So they tried – and expired.
The situation lasted for several minutes, and while temporary workarounds circulated on forums, chat rooms, and Twitter, the behavior issue was eventually resolved as Apple presumably fixed the underlying issue.
Apple previously announced Big Sur would launch on Thursday, and the problems started almost precisely in time with the rollout. We have reached out to Apple for comment and will share any statement if we receive one.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
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