Roger Fingas
Several of Apple's online services suffered a major outage on Thursday morning, marking the fourth such incident in less than a week. [Updated]
The latest problem appears more severe than one from Tuesday, affecting a wider range of services. On top of the iTunes Store and the iOS App Store, the iBooks Store and the Mac App Store are currently down for some users, as are Apple TV functions and the Volume Purchase Program.
Difficulties began around 6:30 a.m. Eastern time, and are still ongoing, according to Apple's system status page.
The week's third downtime incident actually occurred overnight, starting at 11:30 p.m. and resolving shortly after 4 in the morning.
Online outages are a semi-regular problem for Apple, but the company rarely experiences more than one or two in a single week, much less four impacting the same set of services. Apple has yet to make any official comment on the matter outside of its status tracker.
People encountering trouble with iTunes, iBooks, or the App Store may be unable to visit those storefronts, or download files such as app updates.
Update: All services were restored at approximately 9 a.m.
Christine McKee
Malcolm Owen
AppleInsider Staff
William Gallagher
Oliver Haslam
19 Comments
iTunes Connect is a total mess at the moment too. Newly uploaded builds are sitting at "processing" for 10+ hours.
Yesterday, I was experiencing iMessage problems ("not delivered"), and this morning (6:15CDT), Photos on my iMac wouldn't upload pictures from my iPhone.
Interstingly, I get notifications that updates are available, but it won't download the updates.
"The week's third downtime incident actually occurred overnight, starting at 11:30 p.m. and resolving shortly after 4 in the morning." 11:30 to 4pm of what time zone? Or, perhaps, you should start using GMT. And don't say that PT is understood as your byline shows 2 timezones. As for Apple's troubles, I wonder if this has anything to do with the rapid expansions of their data centers? Also, was this only for the US stores or were other stores (Canada, Mexico, S.A., Chine, etc.) affected. Doesn't appear that a lot of research went into this article.
I'm not trying to make excuses for Apple here, as I've personally experienced some of these outages recently and it's definitely frustrating when the issues prevent even simple, everyday tasks from being performed. That said, I think what may be happening is that Apple could be transitioning to newer and better technologies to support many of their cloud services (which include pretty much everything at this point). It's not easy to do that stuff seamlessly -- even for a small environment, let alone a global infrastructure supporting hundreds of millions of active devices/users. So that's what I'm hoping is the problem and not some general incompetence and/or poorly designed environment. Considering their plans for overall sales growth coupled with new and expanded streaming services, I tend to think it is more of scaling issue.