Why should Apple's servers have caused all this chaos?

Question

"Apple briefly experienced server difficulties resulting in some Apple TV units rebooting continuously. This issue has been resolved and is unrelated to the Apple TV 2.2 software release."
Says the announcement above - ok, great to get the info fairly quickly from Apple.
However, I'm a bit baffled about how an Apple Server problem - and frankly we've seen lots of glitches due to this in the past with authorisation on AppleTV, failure to access the Store - could result in this continuous rebooting.
This to me suggests that 2.2 is 'phoning home' in some way that earlier versions didn't - why is it doing that?
Even if it used to do it, it presumably handled the non-responsive server in a graceful manner rather than constant rebooting.
It implies any time there's an Apple Server issue we'll see these reboots again. 2.2 therefore needs an urgent patch to prevent this happening.
The 2.2 update was very welcome for me as I've wanted music video shuffling ever since the first units came out, but to see threads of 14 pages or more within hours of an update is unprecedented for AppleTV and will dent the confidence of users who've gone through factory restores and lost synced material a lot of which might be purchases that has not backed up to iTunes.
Credit to Mark W for posting the announcement so soon, but it does point to unacceptable behaviour in the software just because a server is down to constantly reboot.
AC

Answer 1

capaho wrote:
How long do they wait? The installation takes several minutes and gives no feedback as to how the it's progressing. It's easy to understand how some might misinterpret an intermittently appearing and disappearing Apple logo as being an indication of a problem, it's bad software design.
There should at least be some text messages, if not a progress bar, so that people can see that the installation is progressing according to plan. A flickering Apple logo and several reboots during the installation process is practically an invitation to unplug it before it's finished.
As I said before, you are correct there should be more feedback during the process, however the point I made is that you are clearly told before you start not to unplug the device and to expect the sort of behaviour you are describing.
jim.arrows wrote:
People weren't unplugging too soon and it wasn't the "competition" as suggested by others, it's a bug. Apple acknowledged they had a server problem that caused it, why the conspiracy theories? If it was someone unplugging too soon and thus corrupting the install, nothing that Apple could do from their side would have fixed it. The fact that Apple was able to resolve the issue on their end just proves that it's a flawed software design and that something in the boot process is dependent upon being able to reach the Apple servers, and if it's unable to do so the software clearly doesn't handle it gracefully. It's simply a bug and needs to be fixed, nothing more nefarious than that.
I think you are correct that in this case not too many of the problems were caused by unplugging, however Capaho's point is still valid in terms of updates generally. You are wrong that this is an issue caused by a bug or a flawed software design and indeed the whole point of the  announcement is to point this out.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the update process needing to access the  servers as part of the update process and there are likely mechanisms in place should that access not be available. It's my impression here that it wasn't simply a case of the servers being unavailable and that the more likely problem was that communication was corrupt in some way rather than it simply not taking place at all.