We are becoming used to online services we are reliant on disappearing from use for a while and the inconvenience it can cause.
All too frequently games services are hit and the games we have bought digitally can’t be accessed for a period of time.
While frustrating, it is obviously a huge first-world problem but one we have to get used to more and more.
The latest tech service to suffer an outage is Apple’s iCloud which lots of users rely on not just for personal, but business needs, using the files and storage option for essential documents.
Unfortunately for those people who iCloud is mission-critical the service suffered an outage on Tuesday evening that rendered errors for people trying to sign in, iCloud Mail and web apps on iCloud.com.
More significantly, MacRumors reported that some people were having issues with Apple Pay – Apple’s contactless payment service. Apple confirmed there were issues with some services in a tweet saying: “Hey. We’ve got some ongoing issues with iCloud as reflected on our system status page here: https://s.apple.com/dE4h2p8i2O We’re investigating and encourage you to check that page for further updates.”
They also updated its system status page to reflect the problem (which is always worth bookmarking if you have an Apple device) but everything now appears to back to normal after around two hours of downtime for some people.
Issues like this further highlight how essential it is not to rely on solely one service for everything you do. While downtime is often kept to a minimum as companies strive to correct a problem, at this time of so many people working from home and relying on them more and more, it is always good to have a failsafe backup just in case the worst happens.
