Apple’s iCloud Chief is Departing Next Month: Report

Apple’s Vice President of Cloud Engineering, Michael Abbott, is set to leave the company in April — reports Bloomberg, citing sources familiar with the matter.

Abbott will be the second top-level executive and direct report to Services chief Eddy Cue to depart this year, following Services VP Peter Stern’s January exit. He also adds to a growing list of high-profile departures from the company in the past few months.

Abbott joined Apple in 2018 and has since been in charge of iCloud and other cloud initiatives, including infrastructure for products like iMessage and FaceTime. Prior to his appointment at the iPhone maker, he was an investor at venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins and held executive positions at Microsoft, Twitter, and Palm.

While Apple was originally developing its own infrastructure to power its cloud services, the company has recently pivoted to using servers hosted by Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud instead. Abbott and his group are responsible for a custom layer that sits on top of that infrastructure to optimize it for Apple’s offerings.

In addition, Abbott also runs Apple’s Find My feature, Emergency SOS on iPhones, CloudKit, and software products for both education and enterprise customers. He’s also responsible for the privacy and security engineering for Apple’s services.

When Abbott steps down, iTunes creator Jeff Robbin will take over his responsibilities. Robbin is currently one of Apple’s most senior engineering leaders, managing engineering for several of the company’s services under Cue for a long time.

In addition to Abbott and Stern, Apple recently also lost its industrial design chief, online retail head Anna Matthiasson, Chief Information Officer Mary Demby, and execs in its procurement and hardware and software engineering divisions.

What’s more, not all of those roles have been filled as of yet — for example, the company chose to leave the privacy chief and design head roles vacant, divvying up their responsibilities between remaining execs.

On the flip side, Apple has also had some success recruiting new executives. The company’s first Chief People Officer, Carol Surface from Medtronic, is due to start at the iPhone maker this month.