App Store and iTunes are offline due to DNS failure – update

Several Apple services, including iTunes and the App Store, appear to be offline. Apple’s status page reports nothing, although the company has confirmed the outage. It is unknown exactly which services are affected, but it certainly concerns iTunes and the App Store.

At the time of writing, iTunes on the desktop says “Item is not available” even though a user tries to open the entire store. Apple confirms the problems to The Next Web, but does not say what it is or how long it will take.

Web storage service iCloud also seems to be experiencing problems. For example, text messages do not or do not always arrive with two-step authentication. Apple does not display outages on the status page. The problems have been occurring since Wednesday morning.

Update, 19:01: Apple has released a statement about the hours-long outage. “We apologize to our customers who are experiencing problems with iTunes and other services. The cause was an internal DNS outage. We are working to make all our services available again as soon as possible and thank everyone for your patience.”