Massive outage brought down most Apple services, including iCloud and iMessage

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Enormous, circular complex surrounded by suburban sprawl.
Enlarge / The Apple Park campus stands in this aerial photograph taken above Cupertino in October 2019.

Apple is experiencing far-reaching network outages that have affected services like Apple Music, iCloud, iMessage, Apple Maps, Apple Card, Apple TV+, the App Store, FaceTime, Siri, and more.

Users began complaining of strange app behavior and outages earlier this morning. For example, searches for locations or requests to initiate driving directions in Apple Maps stopped working completely.

Further, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman claimed on Twitter that the outage didn’t just affect services used by consumers—the outage also affected Apple’s internal tools and services. One Twitter user posted a picture (seen below) of Apple Store employees frantically attempting to keep their store running using pens and paper.

Apple experienced a smaller-scale outage last month, but that outage did not affect this many services. Regarding the more recent outage, users who are heavily invested in Apple’s ecosystem for things like mobile payments, navigation, file transfers, streaming entertainment, and more found themselves disconnected for several hours.

A Reddit post kept track of what users were experiencing issues with. Here’s the list:

  • https://iCloud.com

  • http://developer.apple.com/

  • Apple Music

  • Apple Maps

  • iMessage

  • Apple Fitness+

  • App Store

  • iCloud Private Relay

  • Update Server (For updating device firmware)

  • Facetime

  • Find My

  • Apple TV

  • Apple TV+

  • App Store Connect

  • Developer System Status Page (ironic)

  • Apple Podcasts

  • Apple.com trade-ins

  • Global service exchange

  • Device activation

  • Apple Card

  • Siri

  • Apple Support app

  • EasyPay

  • Apple Arcade

  • Apple Business Manager

  • Apple School Manager

  • iTunes Store

  • Radio

  • Schoolwork

Apple maintains a System Status page where you can check to see which services are currently working and which are not. Earlier today, the page was mostly red marks. But as of a few minutes ago, services started to come back online. For example, we were able to make a purchase with Apple Pay, which was not possible an hour ago.

Not everything is back up, though. At the time of this writing, ongoing outages include Apple’s account system, developer forums, program enrollment and renewals, and more. You can monitor the status page to see which services come back online when.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1842580