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Apple Music, App Store, and other Apple services experience outages

Apple Music, App Store, and other Apple services experience outages

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Beats 1 radio wasn't the only Apple service to temporarily go down during the MTV's VMA nominee announcements. As TechCrunch first reported and Apple's own status page confirmed, many more of Apple's services experienced issues Tuesday morning that stretched into the afternoon. Normal service was restored just before 2PM ET. The outages appeared limited to services related to Apple's online storefronts, but "limited" here is a relative term as many popular services are apparently tied in: Apple Music, Apple Radio, the App Store, Apple TV, the Mac App Store, iTunes Match, and even OS X Software Update all suffered problems. The outage wasn't universal, but still proved an unexpected headache for users.

The good news is that plenty of other Apple cloud services remainedl up and running: Maps, iCloud Drive, iMessage, and Siri held steady the whole time. We don't know for sure whether or not the outages were related to the VMA nominations, but it's hard not to point out the coincidence. If traffic from the VMAs caused the issues, it's weird to think that Apple's services wouldn't be able to stand up to it — presumably it had plenty of traffic for its services when it first launched Apple Music.

Whatever the cause, it's not a good look for Apple, which has had a hard time rebuilding its reputation in cloud services after several high-profile flubs — Mobile Me has always become such a canonical example it feels cliche to even reference it. In the meantime, Apple says that it is "investigating" the issues and will provide more information soon. We'll do the same, if and when we find out more.

Update July 21st 2:00PM ET: Apple now says the outages have been resolved and all services should be functioning properly. The article has been updated to reflect this.