Apple's iTunes Store is having problems and iTunes Connect is down
It looks like Apple is having a bad Wednesday. The iTunes Store, App Store and Mac App Store are suffering outages and the company's app submission service iTunes Connect is down. — While the front pages of both the App Store …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is not Apple's first brush with a downed developer pipeline in 2015: six weeks earlier, iTunes Connect went offline after serving developers the wrong usernames and apps. Today's incident is broader — the iTunes Store, App Store and Mac App Store are all affected alongside the submission portal, taking out both the storefronts and the only way to push new software to them.
First-order effects
- Developers are locked out of app submissions entirely while iTunes Connect is down, freezing release schedules for anyone targeting a same-day launch.
- Consumers lose purchase and download access across all three storefronts at once, since the App Store, Mac App Store and iTunes Store share the failure.
Second-order effects
- Apple's System Status page becomes the sole communication channel during the outage — the pattern seen again in later incidents like the back-to-back disruptions covered in March 2022 — leaving developers and users dependent on a self-reported dashboard rather than direct support.
- Any app launch or promotion timed to today is silently delayed, pushing marketing spend and review timing onto days Apple doesn't control.
Third-order effects
- The recurrence of clustered multi-service failures — from this 2015 event through the 2020, 2022, 2024 and 2026 outages — points to shared underlying infrastructure whose downtime cascades across every storefront at once, making resilience architecture a competitive requirement as services grow into a larger share of Apple's business.
The trend: As Apple's services portfolio expands, each outage episode hits more storefronts simultaneously, turning what were once isolated store hiccups into platform-wide availability events.