iTunes Service Troubled since Hours [Update]

Apple has unusual issues in iTunes and iCloud since hours today. The iTunes Store is not allowing customers to purchase.

Apple has issues in iTunes and iCloud since the early morning hours. Apple’s System Status reports that all iTunes customers are affected and that they /4/be unable to make purchases from the App Store, iTunes Store, iBooks Store, or Mac App Store. 

Users of iCloud were also having issues to log-in, but Apple reports that as fixed as of an hour ago. Also not working was the iCloud Mail service.

Apple is rather transparent these days about service issues with the System Status page. The Apple System Status page reveals which of the rather long list of services is having issues. A timeline shows how long the disturbance of the service has been going on.

Reporting about a service failure is always dicy. Most of the time its fixed while writing the report, but the iTunes outage is now already going on for several hours. It has been spotted before the Apple Status page was updated to reflected the issues. 

Not being able to sell for several hours is an expensive outage for Apple that can quickly go into the millions. Such outages are usually followed up with an internal investigation to find out why this has happened. Somebody’s job could be on the line.

Update:

Apple needed 12 hours to fix iTunes.