Every few days, one or more Apple services crashes on a wide scale, significantly affecting the user experience.
The 9to5Mac site recently released a statistical tool about the times when Apple’s services have been inaccessible. Since the beginning of this year, in less than 5 months, the number of times that Apple services have crashed has reached 15 times. Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac describes “the number of times these services have gone down recently has increased to the point where it’s gradually becoming the norm”.
Below is a list of times when users were unable to access Apple services.
- Jan 19: Apple TV+ service down causing ‘no content’ error on Apple TV, iPhone app stops working
- February 20: Apple Support site down, some users keep getting ‘Invalid URL’ error
- February 23: App Store, Apple Music and other Apple services inaccessible
- April 1: Weather app stops working
- April 4: Weather app keeps shutting down, doesn’t show weather data
- April 5: Many Apple services are difficult to access or can’t be accessed
- April 6: Weather app stops working again, Apple admits
- April 10: Apple Music and App Store inaccessible
- April 15: Users complain about a bug that keeps asking for Apple ID password
- April 24: Apple Store inaccessible
- May 2: Apple admits Apple Pay, Apple Card and Apple Cash problems
- May 5: Apple Music, Apple Card and Apple Support are unusable
- May 9: For the 3rd time in a month, the Weather app stops working
- May 11: Apple ID crashes, users can’t sign in or make payments
Even on May 12, the DownDetector website discovered that many users had problems with Apple services such as Fitness+, HomeKit, Apple Music, Apple Store…
Apple doesn’t like to admit mistakes
9to5Mac’s Ben Lovejoy says he’s seen multiple users reporting problems with one or more Apple services on Twitter and DownDetector. But when checking Apple’s system status page, all shows a single blue color, indicating that there is a problem, but Apple does not acknowledge it. This can affect the user experience as well as cause unnecessary misunderstandings.
Apple doesn’t always like to admit mistakes. Ben Lovejoy calls this “Apple’s disinformation page”
Of course, we can’t expect Apple’s services to be up and running all the time, but certainly no one wants to find themselves unable to access one or more Apple services every few days.
After all, Apple’s ecosystem is affecting the lives of billions of users every day. Every few seconds of “difficult to access” or “out of service” of any Apple service can cause both physical and emotional damage.
