23 MARCH 2022 - A number of Apple services had outages on Monday. I didn’t bother hitting them Tuesday for a couple of reasons: First, they were fairly short lived and second, they were outages. Outages happen. Then they happened again Tuesday, so let’s talk, shall we?

Apple’s System Status Page as Services Started Returning - 22 March 2022

Over 20 Apple services saw either outages or issues, according to Apple’s System Status page on Monday, including the App Store, Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness+, Apple Music, Apple Card, Apple Pay & Wallet, Find My, Game Center, a slew of iCloud services, iMessage, iOS Device Activation, and the list goes on. A lot of the notes had outages running from around 12:30 PM EDT to about 1:15 PM. The note for Apple Music said that outage lasted from just after 12:30 PM EDT to a little bit after 2:30 PM EDT. The note said that the service “may have been slow or unavailable” and that “Some users were affected.” Where Music was concerned, I was not among the affected - three cheers for me.

I was affected by Tuesday’s outage though, at least where Music was concerned. Going alphabetically, the App Store, Apple Books, Apple Card, Apple Music, Game Center, iCloud Web Apps, the Mac App Store, Podcasts, and Weather all had either issues or outages. Those all seem to have started between 4:50 and 5:10 PM EDT. Apple listed them all as back online at around ten-past-six on the East Coast.

Apple’s System Status Pages Amidst Service Outages - 23 March 2022

On Tuesday morning - after the Monday outages but before Tuesday’s, Apple 3.0 ran a report under the headline, “Rare Apple outage makes news ahead of WH cyberattack warning.” The site also ran an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article about Monday’s outage. Apple 3.0’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt followed all of that with the comment, “The White House’s warning to prepare for Russian cyberattacks came [Monday] just as the Apple outage was wrapping up. A coincidence? Probably.” Weird take, since the Journal story mentioned neither Russia nor the White House. You’ve kinda gotta wonder why he brought it up.

The White House warning was about possible cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, by the way, not on our ability to hear the latest single from Ki: Theory. I don’t know… massive outages happen. Massive outages two days in a row is curious. It’s not nothin’. At the same time, it’s probably nothin’. Let’s see if anything happens today.