Apple’s iCloud service ran into difficulties on Tuesday afternoon, October 23, causing problems for potentially millions of people around the world who rely on the service.
At the time of writing, the company’s System Status page reveals that issues are affecting more than a third of the services that use iCloud, among them iCloud Drive, Photos, iCloud Mail, iCloud Calendar, and Find My iPhone.
Click on each issue on the System Status page and you’re met with the message: “Some users are affected. Users may be experiencing slower than normal performance with this service.”
The tech firm has so far declined to acknowledge the problem via Apple Support on Twitter. We’ve reached out to the company for an explanation on what’s happening, and we’ll update this article if we hear back.
As you’d expect, people have wasted little time jumping on to Twitter to share their frustration at being unable to access some of the services, and to check that it’s not just them.
is anyone else’s icloud email account down? mines been down for hours :(
— Gemma (@gemmaac) October 24, 2018
One claimed that an Apple Support rep had told her she’d never seen so many issues affecting iCloud at once …
iCloud having issues. I called Apple Support (only waited 2 min!) & rep told me she has never seen this many “current issues before & its likely affecting thousands or millions”. iCloud is down, but Apple still had pleasant and fast support! #iCloud #iClouddown pic.twitter.com/vo0vf0ePc7
— Mariette Booth (@MarietteBooth) October 24, 2018
Apple launched a bunch of new phones recently and the outage appears to be affecting some of those people trying to set up their new handsets using backups stored on iCloud.
Of course I upgraded my iPhone today and now cannot restore it from iCloud…. https://t.co/zlliziOpBa
— Steve Robinson (@Beardy_Steve) October 24, 2018
@AppleSupport Hi! Can y’all fix iCloud now? I bought a new phone and want to set it up asap. Thanks.
— Andres (@andreewberry) October 24, 2018
Apple’s outage is the latest in a string of weird happenings to hit high-profile services in recent days. Just last week, YouTube went down for a number of hours for its two billion or so users around the world. By way of an an apology, anyone paying $40 a month for its YouTube TV service was offered a week of free credit. Shortly before YouTube’s blackout, Twitter had a moment when it started sending users notifications consisting of long strings of apparently nonsensical letters and numbers.
