Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Apple gradually restores multiple services knocked offline

By Trevor Mogg Published April 25, 2023

Multiple Apple services suffered a serious outage Tuesday night, with iCloud, the App Store, Apple TV+, Apple Music, and Apple Arcade among those that were knocked offline for several hours.

Recommended Videos

The problems appeared to begin at around 9 p.m. ET. The tech company has yet to say what caused the issue.

The latest updates regarding the ongoing disruption can be viewed on Apple’s Status Page. Shortly before midnight on Tuesday, the site suggested that all affected services were operating as usual again.

Digital Trends has reached out to Apple for more information on what happened and we will update this article when we hear back.

The outage came a day after multiple Microsoft services were temporarily knocked out by a glitch. The issue impacted Microsoft 365 and related cloud-based services such as Office.com, Outlook.com, Teams, and OneDrive.

Facebook and Instagram are among other high-profile platforms that have recently suffered disruption.

Contributing Editor

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

Topics

Mobile

Apple is killing its never-released iPhone subscription service

iPhone 16 models on display at Apple Park.

Over two years ago, it was reported that Apple was preparing to launch a hardware subscription service for the iPhone — to give people a way to pay a monthly fee to get a new iPhone every year. It wasn't a bad idea, especially with more and more companies moving toward subscription models.

However, it looks like that program is no longer happening. Fast-forward to December 2024, and Bloomberg is now reporting that the never-released iPhone subscription has been scrapped for good.

Mobile

Apple is going to make it easier to read App Store reviews

A photo of an Apple screen and a close-up of the App Store icon with three notifications on it.

Apple Intelligence promises to bring a lot of features to the Apple ecosystem, but one of the most exciting of those is text summarization. According to 9to5Mac, Apple plans to bring this same feature to the App Store. You'll be able to see a rundown of the most common complaints and praise for an app before you download it.

There isn't a lot of news about this feature yet, so we're a bit light on the specific details. If we had to make a guess, the system will work similarly to Amazon's product page summaries. The AI-generated review summaries found on most product pages likely follow the same format that Apple's reviews will. It also looks as though Apple will generate the summaries on its own rather than using on-device processing.

Mobile

Apple’s new app could be the next big thing in mobile gaming

Apple Vision Pro gameplay of Gibbon: Beyond the Trees.

Mobile gaming isn't what it used to be. While we might all look back fondly on the days of playing Snake on an old, indestructible Nokia, platforms like Apple Arcade have revolutionized on-the-go gaming. You can do so much more than play silly time-wasters now; there's a litany of addictive, engrossing games that are on par with consoles and PC in terms of performance. And now it seems likeApple has set its sights on trying to create a Discord-like experience.

Details on this come courtesy of 9to5Mac, which cites "reliable sources familiar with the matter." That's not much to go on, so it's OK to be somewhat skeptical of the news, which centers on a new app that is said to combine features from both the App Store and the Game Center, as well as chat features, into one place.