Major iCloud Outage Disrupts Core Apple Services Today

I noticed this afternoon that Apple’s iCloud went offline for nearly five hours, taking down key services like Mail, Photos, iWork, and even the Web Apps portal. According to Apple’s System Status page, the trouble began around 2:36 PM ET and didn’t fully clear until about 7:00 PM ET. During the downtime, users reported login errors and missing files, with Downdetector logs spiking to almost 1,000 incident reports at peak.

Thankfully, Apple has restored all affected systems and is investigating the root cause. If you’re still seeing glitches, a quick sign-out and sign-in should do the trick. It’s a reminder that even the most reliable cloud services can hit a bump now and then.