Rare Apple Outage Knocks Many Cloud Services Offline

Apple Inc. suffered a widespread outage on Monday, knocking services such as Apple Music, iCloud and the App Store offline for some users and briefly hobbling its internal corporate and retail systems.

The problems prevented corporate employees from working from home and kept retail workers from completing tasks, according to staff members who asked not to be identified. The outage hindered product repairs, swaps and item pickups, and limited corporate workers’ ability to communicate and access internal websites.

Apple has told staff that the outage stemmed from domain name system, or DNS, problems. The Cupertino, California-based company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but confirmed the problems on its website, saying 15 services were down for “some users.” That included the App Store, Arcade, TV+, music and podcasts.

User complaints began climbing shortly after 12 p.m. New York time, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages. It reported problems with iMessage, the Apple Support app, maps and the company’s online store.

Outages of this scale are rare for Apple, which makes a seamless customer experience a top priority. But it wasn’t the only tech giant suffering problems Monday, according to Downdetector. Amazon.com Inc.’s web services, along with Google and wireless carriers, saw customer complaints grow around the same time — though not as sharply. Amazon’s own service health dashboard didn’t show any recent incidents.

Apple shares were little changed on Monday, trading at $163.95 as of 1:39 p.m. in New York. They have dropped 7.7% this year through the end of last week.