Apple Outage Hit App Store, Apple TV, Music, Arcade, Podcasts, And More
Only hours after a brief outage took out multiple Meta services and platforms (not to be confused with the outage from a couple of weeks ago), Apple reported its own issues involving major aspects of its ecosystem, particularly the App Store. Late in the day on April 3, 2024, many Apple users received a "Cannot Connect" message upon trying to open the App Store, as well as the message, "Something went wrong. Please try again." Unlike Meta, which has a status page for only some business products, Apple transparently shows the status for all of its services on its official Apple Support website.
According to that website, at the time of the outage, Apple's App Store, Apple Arcade, Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Books, Audiobooks, Apple Sports, the Mac App Store, and Apple Podcasts were inaccessible, while the Apple School Manager tool, Apple Business Manager, and Apple Business Essentials were all listed as experiencing an "issue." At the time of writing, Apple has not released a statement on what caused the issue.
The outage hit many of Apple's major consumer services
Shortly after the issues had started, Apple's status website had been updated to show an increasing number of outages that affected most of its major consumer services, including its feature-dense Apple Music and TV+ television streaming platforms and Apple Arcade, the subscription service that lets subscribers access games at no additional charge. While outages are fairly common among some big tech companies, Apple is typically not among them. There wasn't anything users could do to resolve the issue, but it only took a couple of hours for Apple to restore access to its most popular products.
While the outages hit multiple Apple products, some remained fully functional during the unexpected event — for example, the App Store accessible via the Vision Pro headset was still listed as operational, as was iCloud Mail, Apple Pay, the Apple Online Store, HomeKit, iWork, and the iTunes Store. Luckily, those services remained functional the entire time, avoiding disruptions to things like mobile payments and using the Apple Card.