AppleInsider Staff
Apple's online services, including the iTunes Store and App Store, experienced an extended outage Wednesday morning, stretching for hours, even though Apple's official system status page suggested all services were online.
Update: Apple has now acknowledged the outage on its system status dashboard, saying that the iTunes Store, iBooks Store, App Store, and Mac App Store are "unavailable for all users."
Update 2: iTunes returned to full functionality at around 5:45 p.m. Eastern.
The outage began early Wednesday, with both users and developers noticing they were unable to access their accounts. The outage also affected the Mac App Store, iTunes Connect, iBooks, and even Apple ID Web login.
Users looking for evidence of the outage on Apple's system status page found nothing, as Apple continued to show throughout Wednesday morning that all of its services were operational. In the detailed timeline view, the site read that "There are no reported issues at this time."
Readers from around the world reached out to AppleInsider to report the issue as it dragged on throughout the morning, suggesting that the outage has been global.
But privately, Apple was reportedly saying otherwise. Developers who spoke with The Next Web said they were informed by Apple that the issue would be fixed Wednesday morning within a few hours. As of 5:40 am. Pacific, the issue remained.
Apple's Web and cloud services do experience occasional outages, and the system status page has a history of not reflecting actual issues. However, it's unusual for such issues to be so widespread, affecting so many services for an extended period of time.
Oliver Haslam
Christine McKee
Malcolm Owen
William Gallagher
Amber Neely
Andrew O'Hara
29 Comments
While trying to authenticate to update iMovie, I received this error: STATUS_CODE_ERROR
iTunes/App is down for me also...
Ditto
Maybe they recovered my invoices finally.
iTunes (desktop) seems to be up for me: I successfully performed a unique search that could not have been cached. The Mac App Store seems fine, now, too.
But earlier today, yes, it did seem to hiccup briefly. An album image in another search result didn't load, and I got exactly one "unable to connect" message when I clicked on it. But the anomaly was gone within a minute.