‘Big Sur has not been available via online macOS recovery since December’

Since December, users looking to restore their Mac computers over the Internet using macOS Recovery seem to be able to download only macOS Catalina instead of the most recent version of the OS, macOS Big Sur.

The problem was discovered in early December by members of the MacAdmins-Slack group, website Mr. Macintosh. They discovered that through the macOS recovery tool, they could only download macOS Catalina even though macOS Big Sur was previously installed on their systems. That is according to Mr. Macintosh to beat.

He showed this in a YouTube video where he restored a Mac running macOS Big Sur and only got access to macOS Catalina, a version released in 2019 via the recovery tool. Almost a month after the first reports, this situation still persists. according to a MacAdmins podcast forum member reportedly informed Apple of the issue and confirmed it was a server issue.

According to an Apple support page, the tool should default to installing the latest version of macOS that was also previously running on the system in question. So if the most recent version of macOS was installed, it should be able to be reinstalled via macOS recovery.

There are exceptions: If macOS 10.12.4, or macOS Sierra, or later was never previously installed on the system in question, it will install the operating system that came with the computer, or the version closest to it and still available through Apple. Macs with a T2 security chip get access to the version previously running on their device by default, and users must update manually if their computers didn’t already have the most recent updates.

macOS Big Sur