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Half-hour outage affects Apple App Store, iMessage, iCloud Drive, and more

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Experience issues with the App Store today? You’re not alone. Both the iOS and Mac App Store were listed as having experienced issues today, along with other iCloud services, like iCloud Drive and iMessage. By midafternoon, the issues seem to have been resolved.

The iCloud issues seem to have started around 10 minutes earlier than the App Store issues this morning, and it’s currently unclear if the two are linked.

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So what should you do if you have issues with these services? Well, there’s not really much you can do. You could try turning your phone off and back on again, but considering the issues are linked to cloud-based services, it’s unlikely that would do anything. Ultimately, when issues like this arise, you usually just need to wait until they’re resolved on Apple’s end.

Outages like this aren’t uncommon for cloud-based services, and while they can be frustrating, they’re usually fixed without any serious loss of user data. If you’re still experiencing issues, or experience new issues, you can check Apple’s system status page here. Thankfully, not all users were affected by the outages — and many could still access the App Stores and their iCloud services without any issues. Others may have been able to access the services, but with slow load times. In total, the issues seem to have lasted a little over 30 minutes.

All the major tech companies experience issues like this from time to time. Late last year, an Amazon Web Services outage caused a number of large websites and services to go offline, including the likes of Roku, Adobe, and more.

Christian de Looper
Christian de Looper is a long-time freelance writer who has covered every facet of the consumer tech and electric vehicle…
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