It wasn't just you, Apple Intelligence was down
On-device doesn't mean outages aren't possible thanks to OTA updates
Issues surrounding Apple Intelligence have been cropping up throughout the day Thursday, and it may be due to a botched backend push from Apple. Users began noticing the lack of on-device Apple Intelligence early Thursday, and issues have continued propagating across devices and regions.
There's nothing on Apple's system status page that would indicate there are any issues, though there isn't a section for Apple Intelligence. AppleInsider reached out to Apple about the issue and has been told they are looking into it.
Apple Intelligence began appearing again on devices around 10 p.m. Eastern. The dialog showing the stalled download has cleared from devices previously stuck.
I personally noticed an issue around noon when trying to test Workout Buddy in watchOS 26. In spite of setting it up a week prior, the Apple Watch acted like it didn't exist.
My coworkers encountered similar issues with various aspects of Apple Intelligence throughout the day. Peeks through social media indicated that others ran into random issues as well.
It was as if Apple Intelligence has been turned off even though it primarily runs locally to the user's device.
A Reddit post and a post to the Apple Developer forums confirmed the widespread nature of the issue. These links were originally shared on Mastodon by MacStories Editor-in-Chief Federico Viticci.
An Apple Intelligence flaw
If you're wondering how an on-device system could be down, you're not alone. When users first enabled Apple Intelligence with iOS 18.1 and the other operating systems, the models were downloaded locally.
Apple executives shared that Apple Intelligence models have been updated frequently since the public release through over-the-air updates. It seems this may have the culprit for the slow, but spreading outage.
iPhones, Macs, iPads, and even Apple Vision Pros are likely pinging Apple's servers regularly for updates to select systems like Apple Intelligence. These updates likely aren't triggered until a user goes to access one of the systems, which may explain the suddenness of some of the feature disappearances.
I personally used Writing Tools multiple times after 1 p.m., and then they were suddenly gone from all of my devices at some point in the afternoon. My Mac mini was the only device still offering Apple Intelligence through the outage.
There's a chance this was isolated to devices running the latest developer betas for the 26 series of updates. We have not received any reports of it occurring on non-beta devices as of the original publication.
The outage lasted only a few hours before Apple worked to fix whatever bottleneck was preventing the Apple Intelligence update from propagating. If Apple Intelligence still isn't working on your device, be patient, the fix will likely take some time to roll out.
You'll know Apple Intelligence is functional again once the downloading dialog has disappeared from the Apple Intelligence area of Settings.
Updated June 19, 10:17 p.m.: Apple shared that they are looking into the issue. Apple Intelligence begins working again as devices see the download alert go away.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
What?!? You post a headline and article about an outage only affecting a "developer beta", and tuck this detail near the bottom?
Yikes. Betas are _expected_ to have problems.
It is still news and still worth sharing. A lot of our readers are on the beta.
People, this service isn't ready for primetime. Hell, Apple can't run any of its iCloud services with 100% uptime. That's simply unrealistic. All of these services have downtimes whether they are labeled "release quality" or not.
Just understand this and plan accordingly. You cannot rely on any of these consumer facing services with total reliability. Nothing new here, it has been like this for decades.
And this is not restricted to Apple. Google's services have gone down, so have Meta/Facebook, Amazon, TikTok, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, MySpace, whatever.