A late-night, multi-hour outage affecting Apple’s iCloud servers caused issues for iPhone and Mac users trying to access their data late on Friday.
Apple users who tried to use the company’s various online services late on Friday night were in for a shock, as they found that they couldn’t access iCloud.
Affected users immediately took to social media, with posts on X revealing users were greeted by an error message. “Verification Failed,” the popup states, and that “An unknown error occurred.”
The Apple System Status page reveals that Apple acknowledged there were issues in two areas of its online empire. The “iCloud Account & Sign In” section, as well as “iCloud Web Apps (iCloud.com) are both listed as having an issue that spanned from 4:55 a.m. to 7.45 a.m. BST, 11:55 a.m. to 2:45 a.m. Eastern.
Both are listed with the same test “Some users may have experienced an issue with this service,” with the status dot showing green and the “Resolved Issue” text at the time of publication.
It is unknown whether it was a total system outage for iCloud authentication, or if it was a limited issue. Apple simply mentions “Some users were affected.”
Looking elsewhere, DownDetector says there were multiple reports received during Apple’s downtime period. However, with the peak hitting only 682 reports, it doesn’t seem like a large number of Apple users was materially affected, or even noticed it.
Outages can be a big issue for users of online services, especially if it happens during high-traffic periods. But, as it was a very late at night incident, it will have affected relatively few people overall.
In June, Apple Intelligence had a similar downtime instance, preventing anyone from accessing Siri and related services on their iPhone, Mac, and iPad. The period again lasted a few hours, until Apple’s engineers figured out the bottleneck.
