Apple fans were tearing their hair out across the globe this morning as both iTunes and the App Store suffered outages. It's unlikely any of them went bald though, as Apple engineers fixed the issue in less than an hour.
Twitter started lighting up with complaints from iTunes and App Store users all over the world at around 11 a.m. EST in the U.S. The problems seemed to differ among users. Some couldn't access iTunes at all, others couldn't search content and more just couldn't download anything. However, all was well in the world again at 12 p.m. EST, by which time both iTunes and the App Store were both back up.
The outage was so short that Apple's official status checker never reported any problems, but was this the shortest iTunes outage in its history?
The last major outage occurred on March 11, 2015 and lasted nearly 13 hours. Apple said at the time that the outage was due to a domain name server (DNS) error at the company. Obviously, today's shortage was less serious, but Apple has not released any details yet. Previous to that, there was a five-hour outage in Sept. 2014, but it only affected some users and as a result, didn't receive the worldwide response of the two latest outages.
It's likely that there have been lots of short outages like the one that occurred today in the past, but they probably went relatively unnoticed or at least undocumented. The immediate feedback that social media provides in 2015 means that even a short outage can cause consternation.
It's a little scary that so many millions of people around the world are so reliant on the servers of one company. Following the outage on March 11, a photo circulated on Twitter showed employees at an Apple store in the UK struggling to operate an old fashioned carbon paper credit card copier as they couldn't take payments on their iPhones or iPads. At least Apple's engineers appear to be learning and managed to save the company from two PR disasters in the same month.
Photo: Funky Dooby | Flickr
