Server Issues During Big Sur’s Launch Goobered Up Other MacOS Versions Due to Certificate Checks ⇥ arstechnica.com

Samuel Axon and Lee Hutchinson, Ars Technica:

Mac users today began experiencing unexpected issues that included apps taking minutes to launch, stuttering and non-responsiveness throughout macOS, and other problems. The issues seemed to begin close to the time when Apple began rolling out the new version of macOS, Big Sur—but it affected users of other versions of macOS, like Catalina and Mojave.

[…]

It didn’t take long for some Mac users to note that trustd — a macOS process responsible for checking with Apple’s servers to confirm that an app is notarized — was attempting to contact a host named oscp.apple.com but failing repeatedly. This resulted in systemwide slowdowns as apps attempted to launch, among other things.

This was happening for me right around the time I was updating Nova and I could not figure out why it had suddenly become the slowest app in the universe. Its icon just bounced away in the Dock for half a minute and launched at a crawl.

Jeff Johnson, who was among the first to tweet the cause of these slowdowns:

Don’t confuse Developer ID certificate status (/usr/libexec/trustd to ocsp.apple.com) with notarization (/usr/libexec/syspolicyd to api.apple-cloudkit.com).

Notarization check only occurs on first launch. Online Certificate Status Protocol can occur on any launch.

I hope this is quickly rectified. There is no reason a local Mac app ought to have difficulty launching because it cannot check in with Apple first.