Haven't seen this page before (although admittedly I only have a mac, I don't use any of Apple's other services/devices) but I like how it feels... "Apple".

First of all they convert the time automatically as someone already posted, which is a very welcome surprise.

The second (and most surprising for me) thing was that they only have 2 statuses: "Available" and "Issue". And while most status pages have trained us to expect that the antithetical of green is red that it immediately catches your eye, in this case it is a simple yellow diamond which is much less alarming. I sense the PR department had its saying in how to present service availability issues.

Oh damn, they can do it just like that?

I thought FaceTime was a P2P thing... but it appears group FT requires Apple's servers?

Very few communication services are truly P2P; it's way more likely to have syncing issues and is virtually impossible without at least a handshake. Even Signal, which does have syncing issues due to being mostly P2P, requires a server for the initial handshake.

Especially on mobile, where you want to conserve battery life.

Each person only uploading one copy of video in a multiparty situation is a huge win for quality on mediocre connections.

Skype used to be "P2P" where one party would act as the host in a group call.

True for audio, not video.

IIRC, this was because of a lawsuit with VirnetX.

It never was (or only was for a short period) thanks to patent trolls.

P2P calls and video calls are patented. I don’t think anyone offers them anymore since the Virnetx cases.

Even for completely P2P things, you can still have server-driven feature flag, which Apple definitely makes extensive use of.

Amazing, a status page that automatically converts to the local timezone.

It’s showing me ‘AM’ and I’m on a 24 hour clock locale

The only sane thing to do.

I wonder how they're going to re-enable it. Can they disable group FaceTime only for people who aren't on the latest iOS version once it's patched?