Apple Inc. suffered a major outage on Monday, March 21, affecting some users’ access to services, including iCloud, Apple Music and the App Store, as well as briefly hobbling its retail and internal corporate systems.
According to staff members who preferred not to be identified, the issues prevented corporate personnel from working from home and retail workers from completing responsibilities. Product repairs, exchanges, and item pickups were all hampered by the outage, impacting the corporate staff’s capacity to communicate and access internal websites.
Moreover, according to Apple, the outage was caused by domain name system or DNS problems. The Cupertino, California-based firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment but verified the issues on its website, stating that 15 services were unavailable to “some users.” The App Store, Arcade, TV+, music, and podcasts were all included.
According to Downdetector, which analyses outages, user complaints began to rise shortly after 12 p.m. New York time. There were issues with iMessage, the Apple Support app, maps, and the company’s online store, according to the company.
However, Apple rarely has outages of this scale because providing a seamless customer experience is the company’s top priority. According to Downdetector, it was not the only tech company having issues on Monday. Customer complaints increased around the same time for Amazon.com Inc.’s web services, as well as Google and wireless carriers — though not as dramatically. Amazon’s service health dashboard did not show any recent incidents.
On Monday, Apple shares were unchanged, trading at $163.95 in New York at 1:39 p.m. By the end of last week, they had fallen 7.7% this year.
