Internal DNS Issue at Apple Causes Lengthy Outage for iTunes, App Store

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An internal DNS error is to blame for a major outage affecting users of several Apple services including iTunes and the App Store on Wednesday.

Reports of the outage started at 5 am ET, and the iTunes Store, App Store, Mac App Store and iBooks Store were all still down as of 1:30 pm ET. On Wednesday morning, Apple cloud services were also down, with iCloud recovering around 9 am ET.

In a statement provided to CNBC this afternoon, Apple said that it is “working to make all the services available to customers as soon as possible.” Customers in the US, Switzerland, Spain and the UK were affected by the outage.

ZDNet predicts that Apple is losing around $2.2 million for every hour its stores are down. The company makes around six percent of its global revenue from iTunes and App Store purchases.

The prolonged outage is a rare occurrence for Apple, who just previewed its highly anticipated Apple Watch earlier this week and announced its official involvement in the Open Compute Project. Its last major outage, according to ZDNet, was in July 2013 when Apple’s Developer Center was offline for more than a week after a security breach.

While its latest outage is not related to an external breach, it still doesn’t look great for the company, particularly as it continues to rebuild its public image after the PR nightmare that was the iCloud breach last fall.

Apple is not the only technology company to fall victim to DNS errors recently. Enom, a wholesale domain registrar, fixed a DNS issue that impacted one-third of its customer base earlier this week.

This article originally appeared at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/internal-dns-issue-apple-causes-lengthy-outage-itunes-app-store