Uh-oh, is it possible that Mac OS X's robust and modern substructure isn't quite as ready for prime time as Apple would like us to think? We have absolutely zero proof to support such a stance, but seeing as it's the holidays and everyone's already stressed out to the max, we figured we'd join in by casting vague doubts over the architecture's viability as a server platform on par with Solaris or (cough) Windows 2000. Our sole shred of circumstantial evidence to back up this campaign of terror? Apple.com's mysterious outage last night-- and the new "Powered By Mac OS X Server" badge on the home page.

Apple has actually had at least a few Mac OS X Server systems in its Apple.com server farm for over a year, now, but it appears that the company has finally ditched all of its Sun boxes and put its money where its dot is by migrating exclusively to its own "industrial strength, heavy duty" operating system. Repeated checks via Netcraft didn't reveal a single non-Mac OS X Server box in the mix, and in fact the uptime graph reported by Netcraft seems to support the theory that Apple is in fact eating nothing but its own dog food these days, web server-ly speaking. That means we've finally come full circle, and Apple's site has returned to its pre-Second Jobs Dynasty state of actually being served by Apple's own products. (The site was hosted by the plain ol' Mac OS until Steve came in and started throwing Suns all over the place.)

But while we're thrilled that Apple.com is once again (apparently) being served by Macs, last night's site outage has us a little bit on edge. Scads of AtAT viewers wrote in to report that for a sizeable chunk of time last night, all efforts to load Apple's home page resulted in error messages or "very, very slow" response times. That doesn't bode well for the dependability of Mac OS X Server-- and therefore, Mac OS X, which shares its core technologies-- in mission-critical, high-volume situations. Let the wailing, moaning, and gnashing of teeth commence!

Okay, that's enough. Now that you've had your fill of needlessly alarmist speculation (thank you, thank you), settle down and keep telling yourself that there's absolutely no proof that Apple's migration to Mac OS X Server had anything whatsoever to do with Apple.com's outage last night. For all we know, a squirrel chewed through a cable. Or Phil Schiller got rip-roaring drunk at the office holiday party, went looking for a men's room, entered a network closet instead, and... well, let's just say that those routers will never be the same again, even after they dry out. Still, something big happened at Apple.com, and we'll be keeping a close eye on it just in case any further weirdness rears its ugly head.