Apple accidentally deleted tens of millions of ratings from App Store

Apple accidentally removed tens of millions of user reviews of apps from the App Store last week. The company has acknowledged the error and has since reinstated the reviews.

Apple tells Techcrunch that the reviews disappeared from the App Store due to a bug that occurred during maintenance. According to the company, the removals were not permanent, but users were temporarily unable to see the ratings and the scores that apps have in the App Store also changed for about a week.

It involved 22 million reviews that disappeared, says AppFigures, who noticed the disappearance. Nearly half of those were in the US App Store, but in total reviews disappeared in 155 countries. The problem affected 300 apps from 200 developers. These included well-known names such as Dropbox, Disney, Hulu, Amazon and Starbucks, as well as smaller developers. All reviews are now back in the App Store.

Development of number of ratings on app Hulu. Source: AppFigures