AppleInsider Staff
Apple's iCloud faced a fairly wide ranging outage early Thursday, with service like iMessage, Photo Stream and Backup & Restore down for some [updated].
Update: All services returned online before 11:30 a.m. Eastern on Thursday.
According to Apple's iCloud system status webpage, the downtime started at around 12:30 a.m. EDT and has continued for nearly six hours as of this writing.
Affected services include iCloud Documents, Photo Stream, iPhoto Journals, and Backup & Restore. iMessage users are also seeing trouble and may not be unable to send or download attachments. Late Wednesday, Apple also noted a brief period in which users were unable to create an Apple ID.
Less than one percent of users are affected by the outage, though that number could be in the millions given iCloud now has over 300 million members.
While not as pervasive as the iCloud and iTunes service outage seen in June, which affected some 20 percent of users, today's downtime hits some of the service's main features.
Charles Martin
Malcolm Owen
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
Wesley Hilliard
Andrew Orr
41 Comments
[quote name="AppleInsider" url="/t/159166/multiple-icloud-services-down-imessage-and-photo-stream-among-affected#post_2383731"]href="http://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/">webpage, the downtime started at around 6 a.m. EDT and has continued for over half an hour as of this writing..[/quote] The webpage actually shows the outage started before 1am EST if I'm reading it correctly, so about 7 hours so far. Edit: Apple just invited me to participate in a survey too. Cool.
Apple is prepping for iOS 7 support. Seems like these outages happen a week or so before a new release of iOS.
edit
Maybe Apple should consider less in the way of stock buyback and more on infrastructure?
Maybe Apple should consider less in the way of stock buyback and more on infrastructure?
Fully agree. It is fine for the online store to be down before the release of a product in order to create buzz and draw anticipation. But it is a total joke to have your services disrupted every couple of weeks any time Apple "sneezes" and for no apparent reason.
Whatsapp is much better. And they are much smaller and have a larger installer base. So, I assume, messaging is not that difficult. Yet Apple cannot manage to maintain it to a sufficient uptime level.
Yep, the more I think of it the more of a joke it is.