Last Wednesday, Apple had a major problem with three services. The App Store (for iOS and Macs), iCloud and iTunes were down for approximately ten hours. This problem brought into sharper focus for me just how many minefields the world’s most valuable company has to navigate.

What’s it like to be the most valuable company in the world? You’re the envy of many, and the target of more than a few. And when you think about all the things Apple is, you can see just what a razor’s edge the company walks. But it seems to walk within a cloak of invincibility.

As a retailer, let’s face it, Apple is the envy of all of us. Sales per square foot top Tiffany’s, a relatively small number of skus are part of its inventory (making stores easy to manage), and gross margin dollars on every item are high enough that air-shipping from the point of production is not only feasible, it’s often desirable. Omni-what? Apple gets products to the customer in record time.

Customer service is generally epic. The Genius Bar has been copied by many, and phone support is typically prompt and efficient.

As a tech vendor, notwithstanding Samsung’s snarky commercials a couple of years back, Apple is still considered the cool kid on the block. The company announced the new Apple Watch with much fanfare last week. I didn’t much like what I heard, but I’ve been wrong about Apple product introductions before, so I’ll hold off on stating my final opinion. And the media buzz has been astounding. The Mac is beloved by millions, and the iPhone itself changed the world of consumer technology forever.

As a payment processor, well…. that remains to be seen. Frequent readers will recall that I wrote a piece debunking the notion of “Apple Pay Fraud ” last week. I felt Apple was unfairly called out for what was basically a banking problem. But the majority of writers continue to call it “Apple Pay Fraud. ” More’s the pity. I do believe Apple has built a better mousetrap. We have yet to see what happens as usage continues to increase. Of course, we all expect Apple knows how to scale, and that its systems are secure. Still, as a practical matter the jury is still out.

As we all know, Apple delivers and sells its own and third party apps through its App Store. It sells music, books and movies through the iTunes store. It uses iCloud for data sharing and charges a minimum of $29 / year for the privilege of using iCloud to pass data between our devices and computers. In this regard it’s a bit of a hybrid: part tech vendor, part retailer, part VAR (Value Added Reseller). And last Wednesday all those services went down.

Circumstances and interest drove me to write a piece of “breaking news ” on that day, something that’s pretty well out of my wheelhouse. Still, the Apple App Store and iTunes were down, and oddly, not much was being said about it. But hour after hour it remained down. And so I published a piece at 3:30 PM.

Ultimately the outage lasted from approximately 5 am EDT to around 4:30 PM. That’s a seriously long outage, and lost revenue has been estimated at roughly $2 million per hour. Some of that revenue may be recouped today, but those dollars that were going to pay for in-app purchases? Gone forever.

Sadly (at least from my point of view) the company has pinned the blame on an “internal DNS error. ” As a person with a somewhat technical background, I find that pretty hard to believe. Ten hours? Seriously?

Geeks can bypass this next paragraph.

For those of you who are not geeks, a DNS, or Domain Name Service, is how the Internet Protocol (IP) address of a web site or other server (for example: 192.168.1.100) is translated into a named service like www.rsrresearch.com . So DNS servers are the internet’s address book. You enter a web site or service name and the DNS server translates it into an IP address and goes out looking for it. There’s a really good description of the process here. You can have private DNS servers or public DNS servers. Generally the first set of 3 digits (which are called “octets “) help determine if the IP network is internal or external.

And now geeks can start reading again.

Back in the day, it used to take up to 24 hours for external DNS servers to populate. As web speeds have increased, that time lag has been reduced to near zero. Ditto with internal DNS servers. It just doesn’t take that long to find the problem and fix it.

So how did the problem go on for ten hours? You’ve got smart, knowledgeable, motivated people researching a relatively simplistic problem. It just doesn’t ring true.

Will Apple’s invincibility shield protect it from continued probing questions on this problem? Probably it will this time. I do know that if something like this happened to Microsoft, the media and analyst community would be hammering at the company six ways from Sunday. Apple, not so much.

I do know that now, Apple has entered the payment space, and so it has to be extra careful. Invincibility shields fall apart when money is involved. On the plus side, Apple seems to have gotten a free pass. On the minus side, the next time something happens, reporters will be searching on “Apple outage ” and this will pop to the top of the list. Therein lay the peril. Sooner or later, the company could hit a critical mass of mistrust. We’ll still love the products, probably. But the trust will be broken.