This is just another example of Apple's severe structural deficit on their cloud engineering teams. From a user perspective, Apple's backend engineering is in desperate need of a management shake-up.
I don't know about that — I've never personally encountered an issue with Apple's cloud services, despite using them for years. Hell, I'm not even experiencing the problem that apparently hundreds of other people are.
Are there other examples of Apple's cloud failures?
I'm having problems every week with Ulysses' iCloud sync: syncs that won't happen, lost data... I back up my data by hand to text files just to be able to recover. It's insane how much it fails and how little visibility over what's going on it offers.
It's interesting, because I only use iCloud sync heavily with two apps, but I never have issues with with either of them, which leads me to suspect it's partly a development issue. I hesitate to blame the app developer per se though, because it's also Apple's responsibility to ensure that iCloud integration is easy to set up and difficult to get wrong.
iCloud sync (the pre-iCloud-drive incarnation) has been fraught with issues. A lot of folks in the iOS dev community have been griping (and writing really great blog posts) about this for some time now. There are times when iCloud just goes off the rails. For quite a while I'd been one of the "lucky" ones, but since then I've had to jump through workaround hoops to obliterate all of an app's iCloud data to fix syncing errors, seen things like two Macs on the same Apple ID that couldn't see each other's files and so on.
Imagine the furor if you could log into the same account from Dropbox in two different places and not see all of the same files.
AFAICT, the iCloud Drive revisions were essentially an acknowledgement that the first iCloud backend API and implementation was just a great big mess. Seems to be a huge case of overpromise and underdeliver, which sadly seems to be the banner motto of Apple's cloud offerings.
