Apple’s iCloud and iMessage services suffered a widespread outage today in which many users were unable to send or receive messages on iOS or use the various iCloud features.
Users have been reporting all day that they couldn’t access either iCloud or iMessage. When trying to log in to services via iCloud.com, a “Connection Error” message popped up stating “iCloud encountered an error while trying to connect to the server.” Later on, some people started reporting that they were having trouble accessing the iTunes Store. Developers couldn’t get into the Apple developer portal either. The problems were able to be traced all the way back to Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, where some employees were apparently complaining that they were having Internet connection issues of their own.
Luckily, users weren’t totally left in the dark because Apple acknowledged the problems earlier today on its iCloud Status web page. At 10:45pm PT, a message appeared that said “Users may be unable to access iCloud services.” That was later updated to say that only some users were having issues and that a fix was on the way. As of right now, the complaints have settled and the iCloud Status page reads that all of iCloud is back online and functioning, but the outage spanned from 9am to 3pm PT throughout the day.
While it’s forgivable to have small outages here and there, a company as big as Apple shouldn’t be letting its users down on such a wide scale. iMessage in particular has been troublesome since the very beginning with iOS 5 last year.