outages

Many thousands of Windows computers are showing the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) at boot today, impacting banks, airlines, TV broadcasters, supermarkets and many more businesses worldwide, according to reports. A faulty Windows security update from CrowdStrike knocked affected PCs and servers offline, forcing them into a recovery boot loop so machines can’t start properly. Note that the outage, causing headaches for IT admins everywhere, does not affect Mac or Linux machines.

Apple is having a major outage of its online services. No less than 29 of them are reporting major problems, including the App Store, Apple TV+, Apple Music, Podcasts, and some iCloud services.

So it’s not just you. Stop rebooting your computer trying to fix it.

Update: Apple was able to quickly fix some of these, so the current total is eight services still having problems.

Update 2: All problems with Apple online services have now been resolved.

iCloud Private Relay, a privacy feature that recently debuted, is temporarily offline. The service for iPhone, Mac and iPad is a public beta so a few hiccups are to be expected.

Apple promises the optional, for-pay add-on feature will be back online soon.

Update: Private Relay is back after being offline for 7.5 hours on Wednesday.

If you’re heading to the store with an Apple Card on Monday, you’d better bring a second form of payment. An ongoing technical glitch means that it might not be possible to make in-store purchases with the credit card.

Update: Apple changed the status for Apple Card from “outage” to “resolved outage” Wednesday afternoon. The service was offline for almost exactly six hours.

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Apple Card users may find that they’re unable to make a payment or see recent transactions. Apple reports that the software that handles these tasks for its credit card has been having problems for several hours.

Update: Apple changed the status on iCloud Mail from “issue” to “resolved issue” on Thursday afternoon. Problems with the service persisted for about 5.5 hours before being fixed, though.

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It’s not just you having problems with an Apple email account. Apple reports that iCloud Mail has been having an ‘issue’ for several hours.

The service is not completely offline, however.

Update: Apple fixed the problem it was having with iMessage on Thursday.

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If you aren’t getting texts from your friends, don’t blame your iPhone. It’s a larger problem. Apple reports that its iMessage service has been having difficulties for several hours.

Apple reports that virtually all its iCloud services are down Wednesday. That includes very frequently used ones like Drive, Contacts, Keychain and Mail. And many more.

UPDATE: Apple restored all its services, though it took most of Wednesday.

If you’ve been wondering why the TV Shows icon on your Apple TV has suddenly vanished today, you are not alone. We’ve been getting tips for the past several hours from readers who can’t access the TV Shows category of the iTunes Store on their Apple TVs, with some complaints being as old as this morning.

What’s odd is that Apple’s status page for cloud services hasn’t mentioned the outage yet. The TV Shows section of the iTunes Store seems to be working for most on the desktop, so maybe it’s just a bad glitch. We’ll update this post once Apple acknowledges the issue.

Image: Alexander Martinez

If you’re having problems accessing the iCloud this morning, it’s not just you: Apple’s official Systems Status page indicates that multiple iCloud users are having problems accessing Apple’s services.