After 11 Hours, The App Store And iTunes Are Back Online

Apple's App Store and iTunes have sprung back into life, after technical issues brought the download stores offline in the early hours of this morning. Downloads of apps, music, and video resumed at approximately 1:30pm Pactific today, after what Apple described as a DNS issue left users not only unable to get to the App Store and iTunes on their iPhones and iPads, but temporarily killed the Mac App Store and iBooks Store too. In total, the services were offline for more than ten hours.

Sporadic reports of connectivity issues began overnight, with iCloud Mail also experiencing problems. Apple acknowledged the issue at approximately 2am Pacific, but while iCloud was fixed roughly four hours later, the App Store downtime stretched through much of the day.

According to a statement issued earlier, the problem was down to "an internal DNS error" that affected Apple's servers.

It's an expensive problem to have, too. Given the billion dollar revenues the App Store and iTunes bring in each year, even a few hours of downtime could have cost Apple – and developers – millions.

Signs of a restoration of service began at around noon Pacific, when apps with updates waiting began to download on some devices. However, attempts to download new apps were still leading to error messages.

As of around 1pm, however, Apple's service status page suggested that the DNS error had been addressed, and that users should now be able to access the App Store, iTunes, iBooks store, and Mac App Store as normal.

Back in January, Apple announced it had paid developers $10bn in 2014 alone.

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