Apple's key services are back online and running again.
The Cupertino-based tech giant recently experienced an outage that caused issues with several of its services, including its App Store, Apple Music, and Apple TV+.
Apple mentioned it already fixed the issue that caused the outage, but some people are still reporting some problems connecting to the company's services.
Apple Service Outage Details
Apple previously mentioned on its System Status page on Feb. 23 that it found issues with many of its services that appeared to be slowed or unavailable to many users of its devices worldwide. On the other hand, Apple stated that some of its users are experiencing problems with a few of its affected services.
The affected services include the following:
- Apple TV+ & TV Channels
- Apple Music
- Apple Fitness+
- Schoolwork
- iWork for iCloud & iWork Collaboration
- iCloud Mail, Contacts, Calendar
- Game Center
- Find My
- Apple School Manager
- Apple Business Manager
- Apple Business Essentials
Interestingly, Apple originally listed 29 service issues during the outage but narrowed it down to 15 that appear as "resolved" on its Status Page, per Apple Insider.
Global monitoring service Downdetector reached the same conclusions based on the reports it received from Apple users. The monitoring service received various reports about the outage, with 64% it received connected to the iPhone, while 18% were about accessing websites.
17% of reports mentioned they couldn't log into Apple's services.
Macrumors mentioned in its report that Podcasts, Testflight, Messages, and even App Store Connect were unavailable at the time of the outage.
Apple became aware of the problems at 4:03 pm ET, though it didn't mention what was causing the outage in the first place.
9to5Mac's report differs from the previously mentioned publications, with it saying that the outage began around 1:03 PM ET. Regardless, the company didn't give a timetable of when Apple users can expect the company's many affected services to be back up again.
Thankfully, Apple corrected most of the issues by 5:06 PM ET,
but DownDetector is still receiving reports of issues regarding Apple's services. Whether Apple is aware of these reports is unknown, but as of press time, the company's System Status page shows that all of its services are operating normally, and it already resolved the issues Apple users were experiencing.
The company is still silent about what caused the outage in the first place.
What Could Have Caused The Outage?
While Apple has yet to address the outage, it could be speculated that the outage is connected to something that the company did in the recent past. It could be due to it no longer signing iOS 16.3 or its efforts to prevent iPhone users from installing a free Beta version of iOS 17.
The possibility of Apple encountering a hack, especially a ransomware attack, is not out of the question, though it is unlikely. David Masson, director of enterprise security at Darktrace, a cybersecurity firm, mentioned that while ransomware attacks can muck up an organization at a large scale, it would require an hours-long fix to resolve the issue - something that Apple accomplished in less than an hour.
