Apple suffers two outages in two days, causing multiple app issues

23 Mar 2022

Image: © prima91/Stock.adobe.com

It has been reported that outages affected Apple’s corporate and retail internal systems, limiting remote work and store operations.

Many Apple apps and services were unavailable yesterday (22 March) as the company appeared to suffer an outage for the second time in two days.

The first, larger outage occurred on Monday (21 March), affecting a wide range of the tech giant’s services and apps.

According to Apple’s systems status page, the affected apps included the App Store, iTunes Store, Apple Maps, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, iCloud, Siri, iMessage, Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness+, Apple TV+, FaceTime and many others.

Twitter users also reported that Apple’s developer website was inaccessible during this time. According to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, the outage impacted the company’s corporate and retail internal systems, “limiting remote work and retail operations like product pick-ups and repairs”.

Most of the apps and services were back online on Monday after around two hours of downtime, MacRumors reported.

While not as severe, the tech giant experienced a second outage yesterday that affected a variety of apps and services. According to The Verge, there were issues with Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, Books and the App Store, which were resolved after around two hours.

Bloomberg reported that Apple told staff the initial outage stemmed from domain name system (DNS) problems.

The tech giant suffered an outage in January that affected iCloud services such as backup, mail, storage upgrades and web apps, as well as Apple Photos and Game Centre.

Earlier this month, multiple sites including Spotify and Discord suffered outages, becoming unavailable for many users. The incident raised questions about public cloud reliability as it was believed the cause of the global outages stemmed from Google Cloud.

At the end of 2021, a major outage at Amazon Web Services caused problems for many websites, including streaming sites Netflix and Disney+ as well as e-commerce giant’s own suite of services – just around the busy time of Christmas holidays.

In October, Meta platforms Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were all down for several hours after a “cascading” network issue took out all of the company’s services for billions of people across the world in the company’s worst outage in years.

10 things you need to know direct to your inbox every weekday. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of essential sci-tech news.

Leigh Mc Gowran is a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com