Apple iCloud Services Went Down For Hours And There Was Hardly A Peep

It's not unusual these days for some popular Internet service to experience an outage. Many of the big ones last a few hours at most. The most recent that drove the Internet nuts was YouTube, which went back up in around an hour. Unless your livelihood depends on YouTube, however, that may have not had much practical impact. When some of Apple's iCloud services like Documents, Backup, and even Sign-in go down for almost half a day, however, you can be forgiven if you find it odd there wasn't much uproar over it.

Granted, the set of YouTube users is larger than the set of users that were affected by Apple's outage. However, the cloud-based services that were affected are more critical than YouTube's. Which makes Apple's silence all the more curious, if not worrying.

Services that were affected include Documents on iCloud, iCloud Drive, Photos, iCloud Mail, iCloud Calendar, and even Find my iPhone. Given that even iCloud Sign-in was down, those might have not matter for those who still needed to log into the service in the first place.

It's customary for companies not to talk about such outages at length, although YouTube did acknowledge the clamor over the Interwebs when it went dark last week. Apple's only indication or admission is its service status page that explained how some users were experiencing slower than normal performance for affected services.

The fact that the outage lasted for hours was definitely worrying for Apple users and customers. The company's silence over such a widespread outage may cause some concern over potential security intrusions. Of course, if that were the case, Apple would be even more tight-lipped about it.