Seriously, WTF is wrong with people's grammar these days? Collective nouns such as company names are almost ALWAYS considered to be singular. Yet I have seen a rash of idiotic grammatical errors due to someone trying to be cute and different with subject-verb agreement.

Look it up.

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/plurals.htm
(under "Collective Nouns, Company Names, Family Names, Sports Teams")

So just in case you could not figure out the proper subject-verb agreement, it is "Apple is..." in your last sentence.

It makes me wonder if their new network management tool had failed at some point because my local Comcast number was completely overloaded (getting "the call could not be completed as dialed" telco messages). Obviously something had broke, and even my father called me before I woke up on Saturday about the problem.