Not the best of days for Apple, as its App Store is experiencing serious problems from not opening at some locations to “Item not Available”. As for the iTunes Connect service, there are no problems there, instead it is completely down.
The outage on iTunes store has been confirmed by various users, to The Next Web. These locations include Australia, Brazil, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Poland, Serbia, South Africa, Cyprus, Canada, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, France, Finland, India, Italy, Indonesia, the Philippines, Romania, Ukraine, the Caribbean, Portugal, Russia, Egypt, Slovakia, Singapore, Vietnam, Israel, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Japan, Hong Kong, Germany, Greece, New Zealand, Kenya, Thailand, the UK and US. In short, this is a worldwide phenomenon.
While the front pages of both the App Store and Mac App Store are accessible, you would hit broken links, if you try to access any individual apps. In fact, you can see music, tv shows and movies on the iTunes but can’t actually buy it.
Further updates and reports have confirmed that logins through Apple’s Developer site are not working either. In fact, users have also reported that Apple’s customer care support in countries like the U.K., are themselves unaware of the issue !
And while Customer support continues to baffle us, Apple on its part has acknowledged the downtime, with iTunes being removed from green-light services on Apple’s Status page :
We have contacted Apple for the issue, and will update the story when (and if) we receive a response.
UPDATE 1 :
Apple has now confirmed the downtime of services via a status update on its website. Here it goes :
UPDATE 2 :
Apple has given a statement to CNBC explaining the reason for today’s outage:
We apologize to our customers experiencing problems with iTunes and other services this morning. The cause was an internal DNS error at Apple. We’re working to make all of the services available to customers as soon as possible, and we thank everyone for their patience.
UPDATE 3 :
After over 12 hours of unusually long and rare outage, all of Apple ‘s disabled services are now back online.
