Widespread Outage Hits Apple Cloud

Apple's cloud experienced a widespread outage Thursday, bringing down some of the tech giant's widely used retail and backup services.

The cause and extent of the problem wasn't immediately clear, but Apple's support staff tweeted they were aware of the issue and working to resolve it.

The outage, which appears to have started around 12:30 p.m. Pacific time, brought down, at least for some customers, multiple iCloud and App Store services, according to the status page of the Cupertino, Caif.-based vendor.

[Related: The 10 Biggest Cloud Outages of 2015]

App Store, Apple TV App Store and Mac App Store, iTunes and Apple's cloud-based photo service all were experiencing disruptions, the page said. The problems had not been remediated by 3:15 p.m. Pacific.

As CRN first reported in March, earlier in the year Apple made a deal to shift about half of its cloud spend -- in the neighborhood of $600 million -- from Amazon Web Services to Google Cloud Platform.

Almost a month ago, on May 5, Apple had a problem operating its cloud services when search functionality became degraded on the App store, leaving some popular apps not discoverable.