Yesterday’s Apple outages brought digital sales for services like iTunes to a standstill, but it also caused things to grind to a halt in some brick-and-mortar Apple Stores. The down time sent retail back to the days before, well, Apple was there to shake it up.
For a window of approximately two hours, Apple Store employees in certain places were unable to check in to work, stores were unable to make sales and Genius Bar appointments were unable to be kept. Employees were apparently unable to check email for even longer.
The result, according to Business Insider, was furious customers, many of whom had traveled to their local Apple Store only to discover they couldn’t buy anything. Problems varied from country to country, but repercussions were felt across the board as Apple Pay and a bunch of other services went down.
In an official statement, Apple blamed the problem on a DNS error, commenting that, “We apologize to our customers experiencing problems with iTunes and other services this morning. The cause was an internal DNS error at Apple. We’re working to make all of the services available to customers as soon as possible, and we thank everyone for their patience.”
Given how much money Apple Stores rake in on a daily basis, we wonder how much yesterday’s little mishap cost the company. Just as interesting would be to find out the cause: Was it a supremely successful hack or (maybe more likely) too many people browsing Apple’s services after Monday’s “Spring Forward” keynote.
Did you experience yesterday’s Apple outage? Drop us a line in the comments box.
