An apple bug was causing substack writers to panic – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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Mia Sato
An Apple bug was causing Substack writers to panic.

Some saw a lower-than-usual email open rate beginning July 24th — which Substack tied to last weekend’s iCloud Private Relay outage.

With Private Relay, user data is routed through multiple servers, increasing privacy but possibly counting each open more than once. In other words: what newsletter writers saw is a more accurate number.

Have you noticed a dip? Shoot me an email at mia@theverge.com.

A Substack post reading, in part: “We’ve investigated a trend of dropping email open rates for a subset of publishers since 7/24. ... After investigating, our team has determined that the recent decline in reported open rates is likely due to an outage with Apple’s iCloud Private Relay. However, it does not reflect an actual change in opens, as click-through rates have been stable during this time.... Secondly, the drop in reported opens is entirely concentrated among Apple Mail users.”
Image: Substack
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