Apple has restored iTunes and its App Store after a massive 12-hour outage all over the world that left its services offline.
An outage of this kind is rare for the likes of Apple; however it left many Apple users around the world frustrated.
"We apologize to our customers experiencing problems with iTunes and other services this morning. The cause was an internal DNS error at Apple," said Apple in a statement. "We're working to make all of the services available to customers as soon as possible, and we thank everyone for their patience."
The service first went offline around the world at around 5 a.m. EST, with the issues being fixed by around 4:45 p.m. EST. While issues such as these can certainly happen, and have happened to tech companies such as Facebook, such an outage is rare for Apple, especially for 12 hours.
The outage affected four of the company's largest services, including iTunes, the App Store, the Mac App Store and the iBooks Store. Revenue from these stores and Apple's other stores nears a massive $50 million per day; however it's unlikely that the outage will mean a big loss for the company.
"People will be frustrated or annoyed, but they won't give up on what they're going to buy," said Van Baker, an analyst for Gartner.
While the company will not likely lose too much money over the issue, it very well could take a hit in its reputation, being the company that claims that its products and services "just work." The company has had a number of issues in the past year, especially when it released iOS 8, its latest mobile operating system.
iOS 8.0.1 essentially prevented many users from being able to connect to cellular networks. The company pulled the update only an hour after releasing it, then releasing another update that patched the issues. Apple also suffered a blow to its reputation last year when hundreds of nude photos of celebrities were stolen from Apple's iCloud and leaked online. Despite this, Apple has said that the leaks were not a widespread problem, but were instead the result of targeted attacks.
The news comes only two days after Apple's latest event, at which it unveiled a new MacBook computer, which makes use of the new standard of USB, Type-C. The computer will use this port for peripherals as well as for charging, highlighting the fact that Type-C is largely the way that the industry is moving.
