Apple’s iMessage suffered another outage on Thursday. The system status support page of Apple later updated that the issues have been resolved. The tech giant faced disruptions to its cloud services for the third time this week. The frequent outages have sparked concerns among users.

The latest outages

The first outage of the week started late at night on Monday. Nearly a dozen Apple services went down for thousands of users. Even Apple employees who are working remotely suffered from the issues as they disrupted service operations. The company’s system status page had shown 11 outages including iCloud services, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, and Maps. The support page initially showed Apple was investigating the issue and services may be slow or unavailable.

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The next day the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Books, and Podcasts were all seeing issues again. Apple's system support status page showed Apple Books, Podcasts, the Mac App Store, Game Center, iCloud web apps, Apple Card and Weather experienced issues on Tuesday. These issues affected some users and were resolved within hours.

The third incident occurred on Thursday when iMessages suffered an outage affecting some users. As per Apple’s system update page, the issues have been resolved. Other services like Game Center, iCloud Keychain, iWork for iCloud, Photos and Weather also faced issues that were resolved.

All three issues seemed to be global, but it is not clear if all users were affected. As per the system support page, all users were not affected.

What caused the outage?

As per a Bloomberg report, Apple told staff that the cause of the first outage stemmed from domain name system or DNS error. The DNS is an address book of the internet that enables computers to match website addresses (IP addresses) with the correct server. These failures occur when the server fails to connect to an internet protocol address. These are often caused by human error.

At the time there has no explanation regarding the latter two incidents.

What has Apple said on the issue?

Apple hasn’t made any official comment on the outages, but the company responded to affected users on Twitter about the first outage on Monday. However, it was unclear what caused the outages.

Other incidents

Apple faced similar issues in the past where several of the iCloud services faced outages.

In January 2022, Apple’s iCloud services experienced an 8-hour outage. iCloud Mail, Game Centre, Apple Card, Photos, iCloud Storage upgrades, and iCloud Web apps were affected. Apple did not provide any details on this outage. Later ‘Resolved Issues’ displayed on the system support page with a green circle (meaning the service is active and available).

In November 2021, the iCloud Private Relay service went down. The iCloud Private is a feature designed to give users another layer of privacy when browsing the web. The feature unsettled many third-party operators when it was rolled out and the issues may have caused the outage. However, no official statement was provided by Apple.

In July 2021, right after Snapchat went down, Apple services were also affected. Apple confirmed that the App Store and iTunes Store weren’t available for some users. However, the cause of the outage was unclear and as usual, no explanation was given.

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First Published:Mar 25, 2022 4:03 PM IST