Some iOS, iPadOS users seeing ‘The iTunes Store is unable to process purchases at this time’ error [Updated]

Sometimes Apple’s services are hit with downtimes, and today appears to be one of those times.

Update: Apple has updated its official system status page to reflect the outage reported earlier. According to Apple, the outage began at 8:56 AM local time, and it is “ongoing”. The outage reads, “Users may be experiencing a problem with this service.” There is no expected time for the issue to be resolved. The system status page says that both the iTunes Store and App Store are experiencing issues.

The original article continues below.

Many individual reports have surfaced today saying that purchase made from the iTunes Store are not going through. While it may not be affecting all iOS and iPadOS users, for those that run into the error there is a pop-up that reads, “The iTunes Store is unable to process purchases at this time. Please try again later.”

At the time of publication, Apple’s official system status page does not indicate any outages of any kind, across Apple’s online services. However, this does not mean that there is not an outage of some kind, and Apple could update the system status page soon to reflect what real world users are seeing right now.

No word on what is causing the issue, either. It’s possible it could be limited to just the iTunes Store for now, but it’s also possible that additional Apple services get hit with an outage, too. If that happens, we will update this post accordingly.