As the whole Mac community knows, when Apple Store goes down for maintenance, there is a good chance that Apple is about to release something new or update an existing product.
To spare you the trouble of constantly keeping an eye on the Apple Store, we here at Pingdom have set up monitoring of the US Apple Store status, and also created a small banner that will show its current status.
So, how do you put this on a web page? It couldn’t be easier. Just cut and paste this code:
120×120 pixels:
<iframe src="http://applestorestatus.pingdom.com/?id=1" name="applestatus120" width="120" height="120" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no">
<h1 style="font: 14px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Apple Store Status</h1>
<p style="font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">View Pingdom's <a href="http://applestorestatus.pingdom.com/">Apple Store Status</a>.</p>
</iframe>
160×160 pixels:
<iframe src="http://applestorestatus.pingdom.com/?id=2" name="applestatus160" width="160" height="160" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no">
<h1 style="font: 14px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Apple Store Status</h1>
<p style="font: 11px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">View Pingdom's <a href="http:// applestorestatus.pingdom.com/">Apple Store Status</a>.</p>
</iframe>
And presto, you will have an always up-to-date icon displaying the Apple Store status.
Just in case you are wondering how often Apple actually does something like this, here are the most recent US Apple Store downtimes:
| Date | Downtime | Products released |
|---|---|---|
| January 15, 2008 | 4h 35m | Macbook Air, Time Capsule etc |
| January 22, 2008 | 2h 25m | Pink iPod Nano |
| February 05, 2008 | 2h 15m | iPhone and iPod touch changes |
| February 06, 2008 | 10m | |
| February 08, 2008 | 15m | |
| February 12, 2008 | 2h 15m | Aperture 2 |
| February 19, 2008 | 1h 56m | Xsan 2, iPod Shuffle changes |
As you can see, there is a clear correspondence between when the Apple Store is taken down and when a product is released or updated. For the monitored time so far (since January 9), all longer downtimes correspond to a product release (they most likely want to give some time for the word to spread).
The banner is linked to this public report page so you can view the downtime history.
We hope you like it! Our Mac enthusiast number one (Pingdom’s web designer, wouldn’t you know?) loves this, so hopefully you will too.
A note on the monitoring: We check that the main web page of the US Apple Store answers and doesn’t return an error. We also check for a special text string on the page that is not shown on their maintenance page. We test the page once per minute and the status on the banner is also updated every minute.
