Catching up on "Pluribus" or updating your apps might not have been possible, as an outage struck multiple Apple Services affecting developers and users alike Tuesday evening.
Almost everything you do on your iPhone touches online servers and services, and occasionally, they go down and become unresponsive. Such an outage struck multiple Apple Services on Tuesday evening that took about four hours to resolve.
According to the Apple System Status page, an outage affected the App Store, Apple TV Channels, Apple TV, iTunes Store, and Maps Traffic. These services may have been slow or completely unavailable.
App Store outages not only affects users' ability to download apps, but also developers to provide updates, even to third-party app stores in the EU. Apple's media services were also down, which meant purchasing movies or watching an Apple TV series may not have been possible for some either.
The Maps Traffic service is an odd outlier, but it could have affected Apple Maps' ability to show users live traffic. For example, this is what helps you see how dense traffic is on a street, or shows where speed traps are located.
Apple also indicated an ongoing issue with iWork for iCloud, which could have impacted collaboration and syncing.
The outage began for most of the services around 6:48 p.m. ET and ended around 10:30 p.m. ET.
Additional services joined the outage and were identified to have gone offline between the initial outage and 7:34 p.m. ET. The outage included Apple Maps routing and navigation and Apple Photos, which could affect syncing.
Services marked with issues included iMessage, iCloud Mail, Apple News, Apple School Manager, Apple Business Essentials, and Apple Business Manager. These services could have prevented users from accessing them, though only some are affected.
Updated at 9:42 p.m. ET: added additional services experiencing issues and outages.
Updated at 11:34 p.m. ET: added details about the outages ending around 10:30 p.m. ET.
