Apple services down for some, including Beats1, iTunes and App Store
This morning isn't turning out to be a great one if you lean heavily on Apple's media ecosystem. According to the company's status page, a whole of host of Apple services have been plagued by issues since a little before 10AM Eastern time today, to the point where some users just can't access them. The full list of impacted features is a pretty hefty one at this point — it includes both the iOS and Mac App Stores, Apple Music, Apple TV, the iBooks Store, iTunes in the Cloud, the iTunes Store, iTunes U, iTunes Match, Radio, OS X Software Updates and the Volume Purchase Program. Basically, good luck trying to buy anything that isn't an attractive hunk of aluminum or plastic from Apple right now.
As if the fickle gods of IT wanted to rub salt in the wound, the outages came when Beats1 DJs were busy announcing this year's nominations for MTV's Video Music Awards. That music industry circlejerk might not mean a whole lot to you, but Apple did nab the announcements as an exclusive for its streaming music service and it was considered a pretty big get for such a young platform. For now it seems at least possible Apple's infrastructure wasn't ready for a crush of listeners who needed to know who was up for what award, but our money's on a far more prosaic cause. After all, the last really notable Apple outage we can remember was ultimately caused by an internal DNS error. Anyway, we're reaching out to Apple in hopes of getting a little more insight, and while we love the potential irony here, we'll be sure to keep you posted even if the real answer isn't as full of whimsy as we'd hope.
