The issue, which lasted for approximately 15 minutes, appears to have impacted all Apple News subscribers who had alerts turned on for CNN based on a slew of complaints that popped up on reddit, Twitter, and the MacRumors forums.
It wasn’t clear if the problem was with CNN or the Apple News app, but on Twitter, CNN claims it was the latter. According to the news organization, CNN only sent a single notification, and the company is working with Apple to identify the problem.
We are aware that some Apple News users recently received multiples of the same alert. Our server log shows CNN sent only one. We are working with Apple to identify their issue, as users on CNN-owned platforms did not experience a problem. Apologies to those who did.
— CNN Communications (@CNNPR) January 30, 2018
Customers who were affected by the repeated notifications received somewhere around a hundred notifications, and the notifications in question were interrupting normal device operation. It appears that the issue centered around a single CNN news story, but we’ve also seen reports that some notifications from Fox News also repeated.
@MacRumors is anyone getting nonstop @CNN alerts about the Hawaii false alert? I have the alert turned off and still getting them. pic.twitter.com/zKLeDMhng7
— Tom Cheung (@tommyknockrs) January 30, 2018
The only fix for the issue at the time was to turn off Apple News notifications, but the problem was resolved by Apple quickly and customers who did turn off their notifications due to the CNN alert bug can now safely re-enable them.