According to Apple's status page, multiple iCloud services have been experiencing various issues for six hours straight. “Users may experience slower than normal response when using most iCloud services,” reads a notice on the webpage.
More than a dozen iCloud services were affected at post time, with many services going completely offline.
UPDATE: Apple said that all services were restored as of 6:30am PT, adding that the outages affected a whopping 40 percent of iCloud users.
As indicated in the official support document which was updated last evening, Apple has now doubled the previous iCloud Contacts limit from 25,000 contacts to 50,000 items.
These contact cards can be shared and synchronized with the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices, as well as with Mac and Windows PCs, and can be accessed through any modern web browser at iCloud.com.
As it looks to build out its web services, Apple has acquired FoundationDB, a company that specializes in speedy, durable NoSQL databases, Apple essentially confirmed to iDownloadBlog after TechCrunch first reported the news.
“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” the company said in a boiler plate statement it gives when it acquires smaller companies.
Chances are you've by now realized that Apple's content stores and other iCloud services are experiencing widespread downtime.
Earlier this morning, Twitter lit up with complaints from users around the world who reported being unable to download apps, music, movies, TV shows and books, as well as buy in-app content, with some even unable to sign in to online service like iCloud Mail.
In an official statement issued to CNBC, Apple's apologized for inconveniencing customers and said the multi-hour outage is caused by “an internal DNS error” at the firm. As you could imagine, they're scrambling to produce a fix.
UPDATE: following what became an eleven-hour long outage, the App Store and iTunes services are now back online.
If you're unable to update your apps or buy books and music on Apple's content stores, you're not alone — there's trouble in iCloud. Apple's App Store, Mac App Store, iTunes Store and iBooks Store services have been experiencing widespread outage for straight six hours now.
At first, the company's iCloud Status Page would not acknowledge the downtime. Earlier this morning, the company refreshed the dashboard which now shows the App Store, Mac App Store, iTunes Store and iBooks Store as being unavailable “for all users”.
UPDATE: following what became an eleven-hour long outage, the App Store and iTunes services are now back online.
If you're a frequent reader then you may remember my thoughts on Apple's iCloud Photo Library beta and my lack of faith in Apple and its ability to keep my photos safe. Nobody wants to lose photographs of their kids or loved ones because Apple's cloud solution had a meltdown one day.
And I just don't have any expectation of that not happening at some point.
During my time spent testing iCloud Photo Library I rediscovered one feature that I had actually forgotten about since the days of the iOS 7 betas. It was as feature that I never made great use of at the time because some key members of my family didn't have iPhones, but now that they do, I decided to revisit it.
The feature I am talking about is iCloud Photo Sharing, and it's really rather good.
Apple today removed the beta tag from its iWork for iCloud productivity suite, which it opened up to non-Apple device owners earlier this month. Now, anyone with a modern browser and an Apple ID can utilize the web-based office apps which include Pages, Numbers and Keynote.
As seen in the above screenshot, users who don't have an Apple ID can create one by following the "Create one now" link, regardless of whether or not they own a Mac or iOS device. All that's required is that they give their name, email address, date of birth and pick security questions.
Windows maker Microsoft today announced it's bringing out new cloud storage integration to Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps for the iPhone and iPad, including the iCloud file picker on iOS and Office Online integration for viewing and editing.
The much appreciated support for Apple's cloud-based storage permits customers to store their documents, presentations and spreadsheets to iCloud and access them on their other iOS and Mac devices.
The big news around the Apple blogs right now is the arrival of the first beta of Apple's new Photos application for the Mac. Coming as part of the OS X 10.10.3 beta of Yosemite, Photos is the long awaited replacement for the aging iPhoto and to some extent, Aperture. In a world where we create gigabytes of photos each and every year, in part thanks to our iPhones, having a way to keep those images organized is vitally important to many of us. Apple thinks Photos, in combination with iCloud, is how we're going to do just that.
But is it right?
Whether you need to create a local backup file of your contacts for safekeeping or transfer them to another non-Apple platform, here’s how to easily export your iCloud contacts using a web browser.
German enthusiast blog iFun.de has spotted a pair of useful additions concerning the Photos web app on iCloud.com.
Two new features, which were added over the weekend, let you zoom in on an image via a new slider in the toolbar and send photos as email attachments directly from the web UI.
Previously, sharing via email was a tedious multi-step process where you had to download a photo to your computer before attaching it to an email message using a third-party desktop email application or a webmail service.
Despite all the talk of a problematic decline in software quality, Apple is feeling your pain and isn't standing still.
Currently in testing, a second update to OS X Yosemite is due later this week. First of all, Mac OS X 10.10.2 apparently squashes that annoying bug which manifests itself annoyingly as intermittent Wi-Fi issues.
Another one resolves a bug preventing your Mac from reconnecting to a Wi-Fi network after waking from sleep, causing you to manually disable and re-enable Wi-Fi, which gets old fast.
Next, iCloud Drive should be now accessible directly in Time Machine, including the ability to track changes to files and documents.
Moreover, 10.10.2 prevents the so-called ‘Thunderstrike’ hardware exploit which targets Macs equipped with high-bandwidth Thunderbolt ports and also includes other important fixes.