Apple confirms App Store and iTunes Store are down

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If you're having trouble buying music on iTunes, you're not alone - Apple has today been suffering from a prolonged outage affecting the App Store, iTunes Store, iBooks and Mac App Store.

The downtime began at around 9am UK time on Wednesday, and has continued to affect various Apple services, including the iTunes Store and the App Store.

This of course means buying music and downloading apps isn't currently possible, nor is accessing the iBooks Store. The Mac App Store is also down.

The iTunes Store brought $2.6 billion in sales in the last quarter of 2014, bringing in around $1.17m in sales an hour. That makes an 8-hour and counting outage very costly indeed.

Temporary outages aren't entirely abnormal but a prolonged period offline for Apple's stores is much rarer.

Rare enough for Apple to (finally) update its system status page confirming the problem, which happened at around 2.07pm, according to The Next Web.

So if you're having issues with the aforementioned Apple services, fear not - you're not alone.

See all our Apple reviews

Joe Cox
Joe Cox
Content Director

Joe is the Content Director for What Hi-Fi? and Future’s Product Testing, having previously been the Global Editor-in-Chief of What Hi-Fi?. He has worked on What Hi-Fi? across the print magazine and website for almost 20 years, writing news, reviews and features on everything from turntables to TVs, headphones to hi-fi separates. He has covered product launch events across the world, from Apple to Technics, Sony and Samsung; reported from CES, the Bristol Show, and Munich High End for many years; and written for sites such as the BBC, Stuff, and the Guardian. In his spare time, he enjoys expanding his vinyl collection and cycling (not at the same time).