Apple’s Vice President of Cloud Engineering, Michael Abbott, responsible for iCloud, iMessage, FaceTime and other critical services, is reportedly leaving the company in April, according to unnamed sources familiar with the matter. This is the second high-ranking official after Peter Stern, the other deputy to services chief Eddy Cue, to leave the company this year. It adds to the growing list of company vice presidents who have departed the iPhone maker in late 2022 and early 2023.
Abbott has been in his position for five years and oversaw the iCloud.com service, iCloud Mail, iCloud data encryption and a custom layer that optimizes Apple’s offerings for the cloud. He also runs CloudKit, a service that developers can use to power third-party apps and software offerings for both education and enterprise users. Furthermore, he is in charge of privacy and security engineering for Apple’s services. However, people familiar with the effort mentioned that the integration of new talent in Abbott’s team didn’t go as smoothly as some within the company had hoped.
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Apple has been paring back its investments in its cloud infrastructure to favour using Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud servers. Abbott’s group was responsible for building and maintaining this infrastructure to optimise it for Apple’s services.
Beyond Abbott and Stern, Apple has recently lost executives in charge of industrial design, its online store, information systems, procurement and parts of its hardware and software engineering divisions. Apple has struggled to find successors in some cases, leading it to reshuffle roles.
The company has not yet commented on Abbott’s departure. Apple employee shares vest in April, when Abbott plans to depart. However, the company has had some success recruiting new executives, such as Carol Surface, who is joining as the company’s first Chief People Officer from Medtronic this month.
