In the wake of a report late Wednesday that many App Store customers were receiving corrupt downloads, Jim Dalrymple of The Loop has received a response from Apple explaining that the problem occurred due to “a temporary issue that began yesterday with a server that generated DRM code for some apps being downloaded.”
Although Apple claims in its statement that only “a small number of users” were affected, Marco Arment who originally reported the problem tracked over 114 affected apps, including popular titles such as GoodReader; Arment further noted that over 20,000 of his own customers were affected by Instapaper alone.
Apple goes on to indicate that “the issue has been rectified and [they] don’t expect it to occur again” and suggests that affected users can simply delete these corrupt apps and re-download them. It appears however that the App Store has begun re-delivering all App updates sent out since Tuesday, when the problem is believed to have begun, possibly providing users with the ability to easily reinstall non-corrupted versions of these updates without losing any data in the process.
