Extended downtime for Apple's iTunes, App Store and more lingers for hours [ux2]

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.