Apple’s iCloud suffers a global outage spanning several hours

It seems to be the week of outages. First several Google services like Gmail and Google Drive faced an outage, followed by Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. And now, Apple also joined the other two technology giants, and surprisingly, all of this happened in the same week.

The Cupertino-based technology giant reported about issues in all of its iCloud services, which resulted in an outage that lasted more than four hours. While the outage started at 11 AM ET (8:30 PM IST, Thursday), it went on till 3.28 PM ET (12:58 AM IST, Friday).

However, we should add that Apple did not give any details about the kind of issues that resulted in the outage. The company just said that “some users are affected” adding that “users may be unable to access this service.” Although no details about the issues was provided, Apple’s support page did say that the problem was widespread. The services which were affected during the outage include iCloud sign in, Backup, Calendar, Contacts, Mail, Keychain, iCloud Drive file storage, iWork, Photos, Notes, Reminders, Find My iPhone among others.

Now, Apple has updated its support page and it shows that all of the company’s services are available and are working fine.

Prior to this, this week Facebook and Instagram faced an outage that was the biggest ever for the two platforms. The two services were affected globally and users could not access them. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger could also not be accessed in some parts of the world.

Some users also took to social media to say that when they attempted to sign in to apps like Tinder and Spotify using their Facebook account, they couldn’t do that successfully. When they tried, an error popped up on the users’ screens saying that the feature isn’t available right now. This goes to show the extent to which the outage affected people. But then, we should also add that people who had already signed into Spotify were not logged out because of the outage.

In another outage that happened this week, a number of Google Services including Gmail and Google Drive were affected. Google’s outage was spread across globally too.

While Google’ outage also lasts for more than three hours, Facebook and Instagram’s outage surpassed that. Facebook acknowledged the outage on its Twitter page at 11:19 pm IST on Wednesday, and then posted a follow-up tweet at 12:33 am IST on Thursday. The two services became fully functional only on Thursday during the day, making it the longest among the three outages.