14 DAY TRIAL // Somebody at Apple forgot to renew a digital certificate, and the entire Mac App Store took a tumble, delivering uninstallable apps for a few thousands of users.
Software manufacturers use digital certificates to authenticate the source of a program. They are used mainly for security reasons, allowing operating systems to detect that a software package is coming from a known, validated, and trusted source.
To avoid a be-all, end-all software application that gets installed everywhere and forever, companies sign their digital certificates only for a few months or years.
This is exactly what happened on November 11, 2015, at 21:58:01 GMT, when Apple's digital certificate, that gets automatically packed with each app downloaded from the App Store, simply... expired.
Users that downloaded apps from the App Store after that time and date were greeted by an error that prevented the apps from being installed on their Macs.
A freelance developer spotted the issue, published it on Twitter, and Apple's staff fixed the problem by issuing a new digital certificate for their App Store.
We found it pretty funny that one of the highest-valued companies on the stock market still fails in such trivial tasks you'd think are only the problems of fledgling startups.
If you're one of the users that were affected by this issue, just re-download the apps you tried to install the past days.
Well that would explain the MAS problem. pic.twitter.com/Nuqj9Uxxiz
— Paul Haddad (@tapbot_paul) November 12, 2015