Photos, iCloud Drive, iMessage, other online Apple services hit by slowdowns & outages [u]
A series of Apple's online services suffered slowdowns on Wednesday, and may be completely inaccessible to some users, according to Apple's official system status page. [Updated]

These predominantly include file storage services such as Photos, Mail Drop, iCloud Drive, iCloud Backup, and Documents in the Cloud, the tracking page indicates. Also experiencing problems however are the iWork for iCloud beta, and iMessage, Apple's messaging system for both iOS and OS X devices.
Problems began at approximately 11:30 a.m. Eastern time and are still ongoing, the company said.
Customers have complained about repeated outages of Apple's online services, particularly since iCloud launched in October 2011. One incident in May took some seven hours to resolve.
In March, the iTunes Store and the App Store were brought down for over seven hours by an internal DNS error. In a rare move, the company issued an apology through CNBC.
Update: Services have returned to normal as of about 4 p.m. Eastern.

These predominantly include file storage services such as Photos, Mail Drop, iCloud Drive, iCloud Backup, and Documents in the Cloud, the tracking page indicates. Also experiencing problems however are the iWork for iCloud beta, and iMessage, Apple's messaging system for both iOS and OS X devices.
Problems began at approximately 11:30 a.m. Eastern time and are still ongoing, the company said.
Customers have complained about repeated outages of Apple's online services, particularly since iCloud launched in October 2011. One incident in May took some seven hours to resolve.
In March, the iTunes Store and the App Store were brought down for over seven hours by an internal DNS error. In a rare move, the company issued an apology through CNBC.
Update: Services have returned to normal as of about 4 p.m. Eastern.
Comments
Did Google do it? /s
this doesn't help
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-sacramento-cables-vandalized-20150630-story.html
That is why local storage will always beat cloud storage any day. Most do not want to rely on internet access or functioning cloud servers to access their data.
Well, it doesn't exactly "beat" cloud storage. I don't really see it as a competition. I see it as an important compliment. The people who keep insisting I rely on a wireless world exclusively, for which the new rMB is seemingly targeted, conveniently skip over these kinds of problems, which will likely never go away. Local storage for backup of important files, is just as important as having wireless access anywhere. When the network goes down, people can still get their work done. And when you're caught out of the office, the cloud allows people to still get their work done (assuming the internet hasn't gone down LOL)
Exactly Hillstones, I agree completely. Service has been down for nearly 4 hours as of now. Can't send email, can't use iMessage, kind of a problem.
People say that Apple is worse than other cloud providers but all the major providers have about the same availability statistics. We just tend to hear more about Apple's downtime around here. Google consistently ranks a little higher but Amazon and Microsoft usually a bit worse, but not huge differences.
There are a number of different categories to consider such as Compute, Storage, DNS, CDN, and PaaS. Each type of platform affects different services. Because Apple's services are much more integrated across the different categories, an outage in one area can easily affect another area, especially since every service is Apple ID related. In the case of Amazon EC2 the nodes are fairly isolated yet they still have a worse record among the big cloud providers.
Is this just a US thing? I am having no problems in the UK.
Apple page show everything is up now:
Nevermind the website said it's over, turns out it isn't.
Well, it doesn't exactly "beat" cloud storage. I don't really see it as a competition. I see it as an important compliment. The people who keep insisting I rely on a wireless world exclusively, for which the new rMB is seemingly targeted, conveniently skip over these kinds of problems, which will likely never go away. Local storage for backup of important files, is just as important as having wireless access anywhere. When the network goes down, people can still get their work done. And when you're caught out of the office, the cloud allows people to still get their work done (assuming the internet hasn't gone down LOL)
Actually it does beat cloud storage because your own example was based on the availability of internet access to get work done. When that does not exist, and your documents are in the fantasy cloud, you cannot get your work done.
Actually it does beat cloud storage because your own example was based on the availability of internet access to get work done. When that does not exist, and your documents are in the fantasy cloud, you cannot get your work done.
It really depends on the type of work you do. For example the ultimate cloud-based workflow might be something that needs to be maintained in realtime such as worldwide database records or relies on remote collaboration. No amount of local storage is going to help you if your cloud goes down. But, the best way to protect your data is to backup often and have multiple backups in various physical locations. Also important is logical and detailed, dated file naming conventions and organized file structures so you can easily find the latest backup.
update - sad, because find friends still nit available, as of 5:20 pm here on the east coast. I was effected by outages today, but when you check apples website it simply says they were "slower than normal" Why can they not be truthful?
Multiple iCloud Services - Some users were affected
Users may have noticed slower than normal performance when using iCloud Drive, My Photo Stream, iWork for iCloud, Backup & Restore, iPhoto Journals, iMessage attachments, Mail Drop, or iMovie Theater.