Apple confirms iCloud outage affecting Mail, Find My and more

Apple confirmed that a group of iCloud services were unavailable for more than two hours starting on the evening of 10 November. Mezha.net reported that the company acknowledged the outage on its System Status page while users were still affected. 9to5Mac reported that the disruption began at 22:49 UTC on 10 November, based on Apple's status page. The outage began late on Tuesday in UTC and was resolved early Wednesday UTC.

Apple's status page listed outages for iCloud Mail, Calendar, Contacts, iWork for iCloud, Game Center, Photos, and iCloud Account & Sign In, 9to5Mac reported. The page also listed Find My separately, saying the service might be "slow or unavailable." Users on social media said they could not send or receive iCloud email, could not sign in to an Apple Account, and in some cases were signed out of their accounts altogether, Mezha.net wrote. Apple's status page had already marked those services as down, 9to5Mac reported.

The Apple Post reported on Wednesday that Apple had not disclosed a cause for the disruption. The Apple Post also said that if a service was listed as unavailable, repeatedly signing out of iCloud or changing account settings was unlikely to resolve a problem on Apple's servers. The Apple Post noted that service availability can change quickly.

The outage affected several everyday iCloud functions. Email, calendars, contacts, document collaboration through iWork, Game Center, photo syncing, and Apple Account sign-in were all listed as unavailable by Apple's status page, 9to5Mac reported. Not every user was necessarily affected.

At 01:18 UTC on 11 November, 9to5Mac reported that Apple said all outages had been resolved. That put the total downtime at 2 hours and 29 minutes. Apple did not say what caused the outage, The Apple Post reported. Apple's status page showed no remaining issues after 01:18 UTC.