Users around the world are reporting that iCloud is down. The problems started around 11 a.m. Eastern and have lasted several hours. Almost all iCloud services are down.
Other Apple services also affected
According to Apple’s “System Status” dashboard, 20 different services are affected by the outage. Essentially, every Apple service which has “iCloud” in the name, like iCloud Calendar, iCloud Contacts, iCloud Drive, iWork for iCloud, etc., is down, but other Apple services are down as well. Among the other affected services are: Find My Friends, Find My iPhone, Back to My Mack, Documents in the Cloud, Mail Drop, Apple News and Apple Photos.
Most of those who are having problems with iCloud simply can’t access the service at all. Others are experiencing partial outages affecting email or file back-ups.
A dark week for Silicon Valley
It’s just not a good week to be a Silicon Valley tech company. The iCloud outage is the third major tech disruption this week, assuming that we lump WhatsApp and Instagram in with its parent company Facebook. Google was the first to experience widespread problems, followed by Facebook’s suite of apps, and now Apple is experiencing a widespread outage too.
It’s quite tempting to think that all three massive tech outages this week are related, but there’s simply no way for outside observers to know this. Facebook specifically told the media yesterday that the outage was not the result of a cyber-attack. So far Apple has not provided any details on its outage or what might be causing it.
However, it is rather suspicious that three of the biggest tech names have all been hit with massive outages the same week, especially given that all three have lasted much longer and appear to be more widespread than most other outages have lasted in the past.
Does this mean Microsoft is next?
