Outage hits Apple’s iTunes and App Store

Apple's iTunes and App Store were back online last afternoon following an unusually long service disruption that the company attributed to an internal technical error.

The rare 12-hour outage struck a little before 5:00 am ET, after which users took to Twitter to rant at not being able to access the popular mobile apps store and online content service, using hashtags such as #itunesdown and #appstoresdown.

The company updated its status page at 5:04 pm ET to show that the disrupted services, including the Mac App Store and iBooks, had resumed normal operations. The company said  a glitch in an internal Domain Name System error caused the disruption.

The App Store and iTunes have an iconic significance for world's largest tech company and form the centrepiece of its mobile user experience.

They are also a prime revenue source for the Cupertino, California company.

Revenue from services, includes everything from iTunes and the App Store to licensing, amounted to almost $4.8 billion in its fiscal first quarter, or over 6 per cent of overall sales.

Shares of Apple, which apologised to users publicly, were down 1.8 per cent at close, at $122.24 yesterday.

An Apple spokesman said the early-morning outage was caused by an internal DNS error at ­Apple. ''We apologize to our customers experiencing problems with iTunes and other services this morning,'' according to the statement. ''We're working to make all of the services available to customers as soon as possible, and we thank everyone for their patience.''

An official Apple services status page initially reported that there were no problems with its services, the page however was slowly updated to show that the disruption affected the iTunes and app stores, as also the iBooks store, iCloud Mail and iCloud account sign-in.

Apple had had problems with its internet services, such as iCloud and iMessage, on several occasions during new­updates of its mobile operating system.

The company was rolling out its latest version of iOS 8.2 to users, with fixes against the FREAK bug.

The roll out also put an Apple Watch app on users' home screens. The update however, first went live Monday and had not caused many problems at the time it was initially rolled out.

According to its status page, the company's iTunes Store problems affected ''all users'' - meaning at least 800 million people worldwide.