Affiliate Disclosure
If you buy through our links, we may get a commission. Read our ethics policy.

Apple Books, Mac App Store outages have been resolved

The Mac App Store is back after a brief outage.

Apple has resolved its outages affecting the Mac App Store and Apple Books, with all of its online stores and services working normally.

Users were affected by a series of limited outages of Apple's online services from 12:15 p.m. Eastern on August 27. Apple Books and the Mac App Store were not available for users at the time, but were resolved by 2:40 p.m. Eastern.

However, they weren't the only ones to have problems on Tuesday.

Later, other services were identified as having problems. Find My, Game Center, iCloud Mail, iCloud.com, iWork for iCloud, and Apple Photos were all listed as having their own issues, while Apple News and Stocks were deemed "slow or unavailable."

This latter group of eight services are all listed on Apple's System Status page as having issues starting at 4:29 p.m. Eastern or 5:25 p.m. Eastern. All were deemed to be resolved within an hour and a half of those times, though Game Center took over three hours to fix.

At the time of publication of this article on Wednesday August 28 at about 8:40 AM ET, all Apple's monitored services on the page are available to use.

Apple doesn't usually explain what went wrong behind the scenes or what was done to fix the problem, so the actual nature of the outage is a mystery.

With Apple's release of its operating system updates on the way, as well as the launch of new hardware like the iPhone 16, it's probable that more outages could be on the way ahead and during the launches.

As Apple needs to roll out upgrades and software changes across its servers before the releases, it's expected that some may cause some pre-launch headaches at this time of year.