Apple Services Recovered After Tuesday Outage

A number of Apple’s core online services were briefly disrupted on Tuesday 4 June after an outage, that last 3 to four hours.

The outage affected four services including Apple’s App Store, Mac App Store, as well as its music services such as Apple Music and Apple Radio.

Apple’s own system status website revealed the outage, but the tech giant has not revealed what caused the problem, only that “Users experienced a problem with this service. We investigated and resolved this issue.”

Service outage

The problem reported began at 13:00 UK time on Tuesday and resolved itself about three to four hours later.

The website Downdetector revealed that it wasn’t just users in the United Kindgom and United States that had been affected. Users from Australia, Vietnam and Qatar also reported problems with Apple services.

Some users complained they were not able to access iMessage or Facetime.

The problems came just after Apple released to developers the beta versions of iOS 13 and macOS Catalina, and the WWDC event showed off the latest iPad operating system update that included multitasking and productivity enhancements as well as support for USB storage devices.

At the same developer conference, Apple also confirmed it is phasing out iTunes, to be replaced by by a more diverse set of desktop apps.

“At 5:20am PDT, ThousandEyes detected that Apple services, including iTunes, started to become unreachable for users in different regions throughout the United States,” a ThousandEyes spokesperson told Silicon UK.

“The issue was first detected in the Eastern US, but soon began to impact users more broadly,” the spokesperson added. ” Network connectivity to the CDN edges used by Apple was working, but Apple itself was not available, either due to network or application issues.”

“The issue appeared to be intermittent, rather than systemic, potentially indicating a transient issue such as network or app server congestion,” said the spokesperson.

Google outage

But Apple is not the only tech firm to experience outages recently.

On Monday Google announced that it had resolved issues with its cloud infrastructure that affected its own services last Sunday, such as Gmail and YouTube, as well as those of third parties including Snapchat and the Discord chat service for gamers.

Google blamed high levels of network congestion on the East Coast of the US as being behind the problems.

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