Apple services return to normal after second outage in two days

The App Store, Books, the Mac App Store, Music, and more were affected

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For the second time in as many days, a number of Apple services were offline or unavailable on Tuesday, according to Apple's Support - System Status page. 

The outages began roughly around 5:00P PM ET and are centered around the App Store, Apple Books, Apple Music, the Mac App Store, and Podcasts. Unlike the previous day's outage, this one did not cascade to well over a dozen services. Instead, Apple started recovering systems within 60 minutes. Two hours after it began all Apple systems had recovered.

During the outage, Apple's status page noted that some users are unable to access the App Store, make purchases from Apple Books, and sign in to Apple Music.

TechRadar's team also verified that the App Store was down.

While services like Music were out, others, like Apple Weather suffered through more intermittent issues are were listed under Apple's Status page's "Issues" section, noting that the Weather updates might be "slow or unavailable."

Downdetector.com's report pages also confirmed the outages.

Many of these same services (a total of 19) were offline for almost three hours  on March 21. Apple then acknowledged the outage but offered no explanation.

By 6:09 PM on March 22, all of Apple's services reported normal operation and we saw no further complaints on social media.

Apple has yet to comment on this most recent service outage.

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Apple Status page

(Image credit: Future)

Five down

The count for today's Apple Services is smaller, though with it including the App Store, perhaps no less impactful. The good news is that Apple seems to work quickly to restore these services. Yesterday, everything was back online after three hours.

Apple's services, including Podcasts, Music, Books, and the Mac App Store, are usually stable and reliable. Two outages in two days is unusual and we hope to learn more about the root cause.

TechRadar has contacted Apple for comment and will update this Live Blog with its response.

Apple Status page

(Image credit: Future)

Coming back

Some of the services that were reporting "Issues" as opposed to "Outages" are already coming back.

According to the Apple System Status page, Game Center, iCloud.com, and Weather have all had their issues resolved. Typically, if the status page is reporting that it's fixed, Apple customers are already happily using the apps and services again. 

Downdetector for Apple Music

(Image credit: Future)

Music lovers are feeling it

Downdetector.com, which tracks people's reports of issues with various online services has caught wind of this latest Apple outage and shows the Apple Music complaints in this stark chart. Notice that the complaints appear to reach their height at 6:00 PM ET.

Apple Status page

(Image credit: Future)

Issues resolved, outages ongoing

Apple appears to have solved all its issues revolving around Apple Card, Game Center, iCloud.com, and Weather.

The remaining five issues with Podcasts, Mac App Store, Apple Music, Apple Books, and the App Store are ongoing. All Apple's outage reports note that "some users are affected," which means some Apple customers might not be experiencing any trouble at all.

And we're back

After roughly two hours, according to Apple's Status Page reports, all systems are back to normal, or as the page puts it, "Resolved outage," for the App Store, Apple Music, the Mac App Store, and Podcasts.

The only remaining question is why this happened for the second day in a row. No word from Apple, yet, but this second Apple Services outage appears over.

Apple Status page

(Image credit: Future)