Apple is having a bad month. Sure, the company launched two new iPhones, introduced the world to their first wearable device, and debuted a brand-new NFC payment system, but for everything that went right something somewhere also seems to have gone horribly wrong.
It started with a heavily-promoted live stream that failed within minutes, then moved to a massive, probably overblown “scandal” over bent iPhones. There was also the sudden discovery of a critical flaw that prevented a key iOS 8 feature from being available at launch paired with the subsequent botched update that was supposed to fix the problem but instead left owners of the latest iPhones potentially stranded without cell service for well over 24 hours.
And that’s not even counting the highly-publicized scandal in which a number of celebrity iCloud accounts were allegedly compromised due to Apple’s insufficient security measures on certain functions. Oh, and let’s not forget about that U2 album nobody wanted but everybody got anyway.
The last thing Apple really needs is one more big problem mucking up its image this month. Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly what the folks at Cupertino are getting today, as a newly-discovered bug in the iOS “reset settings” function runs the risk of permanently deleting all of the iWork documents stored in your iCloud account.
As discovered by MacRumors, using iOS 8’s “reset settings” button may reset more than just your settings. Despite the popup notifying you that no media or documents will be deleted, there have been multiple confirmed reports of users losing all of their iWork documents after using the option. Whether this problem affects other applications has yet to be seen, though the user who first noted the problem has indicated that only Apple’s productivity apps were impacted.
These documents don’t just disappear from the iOS device, either. They vanish from the web-based iCloud Drive manager and computers running OS X Yosemite. If you happen to have a backup for your files (and you should!), you can retreive the files from there. If you don’t have a backup, you’re out of luck. Your documents are gone forever.
According to the original report, Apple support teams are working to attempt to recover data that was deleted by this bug for users who reported it, so if you’ve been affected by this you should try reaching out to the company immediately for help. There’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to get your documents back, though.
Earlier today we reported that Apple was currently working on three significant updates for iOS 8 to be released over the next month and beyond (with the first beta of these updates already available for developers), likely to enable features such as Apple Pay and compatiblity with the Apple Watch. Hopefully this indicates that the company plans to rapidly address issues as the arise in the mobile operating system, though as we saw with the 8.0.1 update, a rapid response may not exactly be preferable to one that works properly.
We’ve (unfortunately) come a long way from the days of “It just works.” Here’s hoping we can get back there sooner rather than later.
