Apple's refreshed system status page tracks services, stores and iCloud

Apple's new system status page. | Source: Apple

Unlike the service's previous iteration, Apple's revamped system status page offers a comprehensive look at most of its critical online assets, including Messages, iTunes and everything iCloud. As noted by the webpage's title, the system tracks "Apple Services, Stores, and iCloud."

Also added is a new interactive timeline at the bottom of the page that allows users to scroll through past few days to see when problems were recorded and for how long. Currently the timeline only goes as far back as Dec. 11, likely the date on which data collection began.

Overall, the update is a huge improvement to its predecessor, which only gave brief descriptions of outages as they occured without an easy way to track performance over time.

While the newly redesigned page is a welcome improvement in keeping users up to date, a more pressing issue is the recent series of outages suffered by Apple's cloud-based services. The latest downtime came in November when an issue hit U.S. iMessage and FaceTime users. It was the fourth such outage in the three months, coming after an incident in September and two in October (1, 2) that affected both iOS and OS X Messages users.