Malcolm Owen
Apple endured multiple outages across its online services on Monday, issues that affected iCloud, the App Store, Mac App Store, and other areas.
Notifications on the Apple Support System Status page advise of a total of ten issues that occurred at roughly the same period of time. Of the ten items, eight are listed as "issues" while two are deemed to be "outages," with all marked as resolved by Apple's support teams.
The two outages affected the App Store and the Mac App Store, and took place between 1:05pm and 1:38pm eastern time. On both listings, Apple advises "some users were affected," and that "this service may have been slow or unavailable."
Under the "Issues" group, the listings all said to have started at 12:57pm eastern time, and were resolved between 1:32pm and 1:35pm eastern time. Across all cases "some users were affected," and either it was "slow or unreliable" or was unavailable to use.
The list of services affected in this group include:
- Apple School Manager
- Find My
- Game Center
- iCloud Account & Sign In
- iCloud Drive
- iCloud Mail
- iMessage
- Schoolwork
All of Apple's online services now appear to be functioning normally.
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4 Comments
This messed me up this morning was I couldn't receive two-factor authentication texts.
These services run 24/7 for countless, thousands of hours for hundreds of millions of people globally without a hitch. Yet all we hear is about are the complaints about those few hours.
Yes, these outages are quite rare. I happened to notice this one only because I was sitting down for lunch and opened my iPad an figured I'd check for app updates. When the 3 required updates failed to download I checked Apple's system status and saw that the App Store was having an outage. Less than 10 minutes later the issue had been resolved and the updates completed, even before Apple's system status reported that everything was resolved. Based on my awareness of Apple's downtime. I'd bet that their real availability performance for any given service is probably close to or better than two nines (99.99%) range, and probably around one nine (99.9%) for all services as a whole. I think that is pretty damn good.