In case you were nowhere near Twitter for the past twenty-five minutes or so — where “access denied” is now trending — Apple.com has been going down and then back up, down and then back up for gasp almost a half hour, showing the above error message.
No one is quite sure why the site went down (according to one source familiar with the matter, it is possibly a hack attempt) but I’m sure the millions of geeks hitting refresh with bated breath isn’t helping.
Update: A Whois lookup via Carlos Granier shows that there is indeed something fishy going on with Apple’s DNS. But it’s not clear whether that is due to hackers or DNS spammers.
Update 2: Looks like it is DNS spammers responsible for the wonky Whois lookup — my above source was looking at the same thing. The issues might just be plain old server problems — boring, I know.
https://twitter.com/#!/mattbuchanan/status/121302333622726656
https://twitter.com/#!/stevenjayl/status/121300964710944768
https://twitter.com/#!/taylorbuley/status/121300900219338752