Apple Bans Iran from the App Store

Catalin Cimpanu, Bleeping Computer:

Iranian users have not been able to access Apple’s App Store all day today, in what appears to be a ban put in place by the US company.

And:

Users were not able to connect to the Apple App Store to install or update applications. When visiting the App Store, they were instead greeted with the message “The App Store is unavailable in the country or region you’re in”.

This ban appears to be IP-based. Meysam Firouzi —an Iranian security researcher— told Bleeping Computer that he successfully connected to the App Store while using a VPN, despite having Iran-related details set on his account.

And:

In August 2017, Apple removed all apps created by Iranian developers from the App Store, attributing the move to US-imposed economic sanctions.

Interesting. Wondering if we’ll ever know the behind-the-scenes on this.

UPDATE from Bleeping Computer:

As of around 1 AM EST, Bleeping Computer received a message from Firouzi stating that the App Store was once again accessible in Iran. Apple has still not comment or returned our queries, so we are unsure if this was a mistake or something else that caused the outage.