What just happened? On the 4th of July, several of Apple's iCloud services including Photos, Mail, Find my Friends and Calendars, among others, suffered outages in the US with users reporting Apple Stores unable to complete transactions in what may well be a worldwide issue. Lasting a few hours, Apple's System Status page since reports all services back online.
Like Facebook, Apple had trouble with availability of some of its services for the second time this year when users took to social media and reported of the outage. Although Apple said that "some" users were affected, one of them who visited the company's retail stores was apparently told by employees of a much wider outage affecting every store in the world, reports MacRumors.
The awkward moment you go into the Apple store and they say every store in the world right now can't sell anything.
--- Elliott Cantor (@ElliottCantor) July 4, 2019
Systems down and they don't know how long for. #FirstWorldProblems #Apple
Developer tools including App Store Connect API, CloudKit Dashboard and TestFlight were also impacted by the outage. Issues with Apple Pay meant some users weren't able to set up Apple Cash, send/receive money, or do bank transfers using the service.
Find My Friends and Find My iPhone outages meant some users "may have been unable to find the location of their friends or devices, list registered devices, play a sound on their device, remotely wipe a device, or put the device in lost mode."
iCloud Calendar and iCloud Reminders took the longest to resolve after the services faced issues lasting for more than 5 hours. "Users may be experiencing a problem with this service" said most of the labels associated with the affected services on Apple's System Status page, all of which have been resolved since.