Apple's Online Stores Mysteriously Offline [Updated]

Earlier today, Apple's online stores around the world went down for unknown reasons. Mysteriously, the stores seems to be mostly unreachable, with users only occasionally able to load the pages at all. When store pages do load, they show Apple's usual "We'll be back soon" sticky note, but it is unclear why even that notice can only be reached on a small fraction of attempts.

apple store down sticky
No specific product updates were expected today, and the store went down a little before 4:30 AM Pacific Time, hours later than Apple's usual window for store updates. And with the store remaining down well beyond the usual time of 5:30 AM Pacific Time when Apple typically brings the store back up after an update, something certainly appears to be seriously wrong.

safari cant open page
Speculation on the downtime is naturally running rampant, with observers suggesting everything from a major failure at one of Apple's data centers to a potential denial-of-service attack. Apple has apparently been silent on the issue so far, and thus no official explanation for the outage is known.

Update: Some users have reported success accessing Apple's online stores and seeing them back up with no visible changes. Others are, however, continuing to experience problems connecting to the store.

Update 2: Access to Apple's online stores appears to have essentially returned to normal.

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Top Rated Comments

IzzyJG99 Avatar
178 months ago
They must be running 10.7.1 and their wi-fi dropped.....
Score: 19 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Steviejobz Avatar
178 months ago
If Apple does 50% of its sales online, every hour the store is down is costing the company $6.6 million based on last qtr sales
Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)
saving107 Avatar
178 months ago
iPhone 5 came up for pre-order and I pre-ordered all 2 million of the initial allotment for the US. Sorry guys.

oh well, i guess no new iPhone for me.




Apparently everyone's getting voted down. :(

Today is opposite day, down means up.
Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)
slicecom Avatar
178 months ago
If Apple does 50% of its sales online, every hour the store is down is costing the company $6.6 million based on last qtr sales

"I was going to buy a Mac, but the Apple online store is temporarily down, so I'll buy a PC instead." :confused:
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Ryth Avatar
178 months ago
If Apple does 50% of its sales online, every hour the store is down is costing the company $6.6 million based on last qtr sales

Doesn't mean anything. They'll just come back later and buy whatever they wanted.

It's not like 6.6 million vanishes never to return. It's pushed to a later time in the day.

Kinda meaningless comment.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
thundercato Avatar
178 months ago
iPad 3, iPhone 5, and Apple TV 3, obviously!
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)