iCloud Private Relay issue July 25-28


Were you concerned about a drop in open rates starting on Thursday, July 25th, and running through most of the weekend? It turns out, it's not just you.

Apple suffered an outage during that time; the issue affecting their "iCloud Private Relay" functionality (which probably also affected "Mail Privacy Protection") as well. Many Apple users were reporting that content often, but not consistently, failed to load until the private relay feature was disabled.

At the same time, multiple email service provider (ESP) and marketing automation platforms (including Substacknoted an unexpected drop in opens during the same period, as the intermittent content loading issues also impact the ability to load open tracking pixels.

According to various news reports (including this one from Apple Insider), the issue was noted by Apple as resolved as of 10:59 PM Eastern time on Sunday, July 28th.

As so much email content loads through Apple proxies nowadays, it seems as though any downtime with these systems are likely to have a significantly pass through effect for email marketing systems.

TL;DR? If Apple's private relay functionality is down, and/or your iPhone can load images in email, expect open tracking to be negatively affected.

[ H/T: Multiple folks reached out to me to ask if there was any sort of industry-wide issue with open tracking over the weekend. ]

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