Apple iCloud Services Starts to Come Back Online After Multi-Hour Outage

An Apple iPad on a stand

Apple iCloud services such as iCloud Mail, Find My, and iCloud Calendar began to come back online in the late evening after an outage that lasted several hours and impacted millions of users.

Apple confirmed the outage and said that the issues have now been fixed.

In a statement on its status page, Apple said that “some users were affected,” adding that “the service may have been slow or unavailable.”

The outage also impacted iWork for iCloud and iCloud Contacts as well as the ability to share images via an iCloud link.

FBT Editorial Director Jonathan Spira tried to share photo via an iCloud link shortly before 8 p.m. EDT and received a message saying that the feature was unavailable.

The outage began, according to Apple, at 7:24 p.m. EDT and was resolved shortly before 9 p.m.

Downdetector, a service that tracks such information, began reporting a dramatic spike in iCloud outage reports at approximately 7:30 p.m. EDT.   By 10 p.m. there was only a small trickle of reports.

This is the third time in as many weeks that iCloud related services have gone down, all with little or no explanation by Apple about the nature of the problem.

(Photo: Accura Media Group)