Apple's iMessage service experienced a rare outage on Thursday that was reported by many users across the globe.
iMessage is experiencing an outage
The iMessage service is one of Apple's most used, with millions of messages going out in seconds. When it experiences an outage, it is an immediate effect and easily discovered by services like Downdetector.
Starting at about 5:40 p.m. EST, reports started flooding in of slow to send or failed messages via iMessage. Reports peaked shortly after 6 p.m. EST and declined until about 7:30 p.m. EST.
The outage is over. Apple's system status shows an issue occurred between 5:49 p.m. and 6:35 p.m. EST. It shows that it has been resolved.
Updated May 16, 7:50 p.m.: Text updated to reflect the outage ending and Apple's status page update.