AppleInsider Staff
Apple's iCloud was hit with an hours-long downtime on Monday, leaving an unknown number of subscribers without access to account sign-in services and certain web apps normally available through iCloud.com.
Apple acknowledged the disruption of services on its System Status webpage, noting "some users" were impacted by the outage which apparently struck at approximately 11 a.m. Pacific.
According to a brief summary provided by Apple, customers experiencing issues may not be able to sign in to or create iCloud accounts during the downtime. Web apps are also unavailable for some users, restricting web client access to Mail, Calendar and other products.
It is unclear how far the iCloud issue has spread, though some users report iCloud systems are working sporadically in parts of the U.S.
Apple is currently investigating the problem, which is ongoing as of this writing.
Today's issues cropped up just a few hours after Apple enabled iCloud Photo library Touch Bar support and new user interface assets for iCloud.com beta testers. Whether the outage is related to the feature additions is unknown.
Update: Apple has resolved the issue after three hours of downtime.
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13 Comments
Wasn't able to access iCloud calendars via the Calendar app on my Mac or iCloud.com, and my iCloud drive on my Mac was wonky. As of now, I'm back up and running.
Just a few minutes ago still having trouble with mail. Calendar seemed OK. Go figure.
All working now, after an hour of non-connection issues, with iCloud mail and iCloud logins.
Thought it had something to do with today's macOS Sierra Beta 5, that I had just installed.
But it turned out it was just just coincidence.
Still no joy with authenticating my iCloud sign on from OS 10.8.5. The setup.icloud.com server that it hits (according to Little Snitch) is not online and therefore cannot vend the configuration back to me. This was all working fine before. But I signed out and tried to sign back in a few days ago after setting the invitation preference on the web interface to defat the Calendar spams. Managed to get iCloud mail working by setting up a manually configured IMAP account but cannot so far get CalDAV and CardDAV working although some of the advice from MobileMe configs back in 2012 got me partway there. Cannot understand why a vital server was taken down. 10.8.5 on another machine is happily communicating with iCloud and syncing just fine. Health warning to all 10.8.5 users then is to not sign out of iCloud because you won't be able to sign back in until they fix this. Very likely affects other OS variants too. New users may not see these problems because iCloud authentication is handled quite differently on later OS versions. Have been examining preferences between the two otherwise identical machines to see if I can clone some plist files across to fix this. Only limited success so far. I have to congratulate the Apple Support team for taking ownership and chasing engineering for a fix.
Apple is in a difficult situation trying to offer web services on par with Google and still lacking big time. Meanwhile we as users are not getting the "it just works" philosophy.