Although Apple is one of the companies where many people want to work, not all employees who are part of the company who continue to be part of it. According to CNBC, the executive responsible for iCloud infrastructure has decided to leave the company. Erick Bilingsley was Director of Internet Services Operations and was the in charge of overseeing much of the iCloud backend, that is, the part that processes all the requests made to the servers, the most complex part in creating software.
Erick came to Apple 4 years ago, having been through eBay and Google. Patrick Gates will be in charge of replacing Erick, who until now was in charge of the service infrastructure such as Siri. According to CNBC, data infrastructure is a constant headache for Apple and they see in Gates a more than feasible solution to be able to straighten the ship. Currently Apple relies on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure for the back-end, but this change could suggest that Apple move away from these services and thus focus on its own back-end "McQueen" project.
The first news about the McQueen project was published last year, a project in which Apple is working to create its own back-end so that it can reduce your dependence on both Amazon and Microsoft. Other news related to this project stated that Apple was working on six similar infrastructure projects and was waiting to decide which one to keep.
As it's usual, Apple has made no statement about Eric's departure, but everything seems to indicate that Apple's departure is due to operational or implementation problems with the iCloud servers and the McQueen project, so it is likely that he has been fired.