Apple Online Services Suffering Outage

Have you been trying and failing to get onto various Apple services today? Like the App Store, or iTunes, or iCloud? If so, you’re not alone: today 9to5Mac reports that multiple online Apple services are inexplicably down today, with no relief in sight.

According to the post, the Mac and iOS App Stores are both down, as is iTunes Connect, iBooks, iCloud, and Game Center. Meanwhile, Apple’s System Status Page only shows that the Mac and iOS App Stores are down, along with iTunes and iBooks. According to the status page, as of this writing, all the rest of Apple’s services are functioning normally.

The detailed timeline does offer up some more insight into the outage, showing that the iCloud outages were resolved a little over three hours ago. Meanwhile, all the outages began about seven hours ago – around 1:45 am Pacific. The detailed timeline also notes the specific services that are definitively still down:

“Customers may be unable to make purchases from the App Store, iTunes Store, iBooks Store, or Mac App Store,” it reads.

Additionally, our own Jeff Weisbein reports that he still can’t log into iCloud, despite the Status Page saying that it’s working.

What’s happening may have something to do with the recently released iOS 8.2, a new OS update designed to accommodate the presence and functions of the forthcoming Apple Watch. Usually weird problems with Apple’s services happen to coincide with new OS or firmware updates, so it wouldn’t be altogether surprising if this was part of that. We won’t know for sure unless Apple lets us know – and for now, it seems likely that they have their hands full trying to fix the problem, whatever it is.

[Source: 9to5Mac, Apple Support]