Apple became the third major tech provider to suffer an outage this week, with significant iCloud outages on Thursday.
The iPhone maker reported widespread outages of cloud-based services such as News, Photos and Find My Phone, as well as direct iCloud services like Drive, Contacts, Calendar, Mail, Backup, Notes, Reminders and more.
Apple’s System Status page reported that around half of these major iCloud functions were experiencing partial outages Thursday afternoon/evening.
However, the same page is now showing the issues – which did not affect FaceTime, iMessage, Apple Pay and the App Store among other major apps – as being resolved.
Related: Best iPhone 2019
Most of the issues now marked as resolved revolved around an inability to access the services at all. “Some users are affected, users may be unable to access this service,” read a lot of the notices.
Apple hasn’t commented on what caused the outages on Thursday, but the green spots next to all of its services tells its own story.
The hiccups came after Facebook and Google suffered crippling outages earlier in the week.
The Facebook issue, which the company says was caused by a “server configuration change”, resulted in outages for the main platform, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. The company was quick to deny the problems were down to a DDoS attack.
Anddddd… we're back. pic.twitter.com/5E8UdlcsPJ
— Instagram (@instagram) March 14, 2019
Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services. We've now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience.
— Facebook (@facebook) March 14, 2019
On Tuesday, it was Gmail and Google Drive incurring the wrath of users as an hours-long outage affected both platforms on Tuesday night. Google described it as “service disruption” and things were back up and running on Wednesday.
While Facebook has cited its own reasons for its outage, Apple and Google are yet to. It could be a gigantic coincidence that all three of these tech behemoths have suffered disruption in three days, but it’s also within the realms of possibility there’s something bigger at play here.
Have you been affected by the major outages this week? Let us know @TrustedReviews on Twitter.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.