Apple weathers July 4 outage affecting iCloud, Apple Pay

Apple Inc. on July 4 experienced a widespread outage that affected its iCloud services and some retail store operations in North America for about three hours.

The incident underscored the vulnerability of digital payment platforms to technical troubles. Visa and Mastercard have each experienced serious outages within the last couple of years.

Apple VP Jennifer Bailey walks past Apple Pay logo for speech.
Jennifer Bailey, vice president of online store at Apple Inc., smiles after speaking during the Apple World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Monday, June 8, 2015. Apple Inc. kicked off its annual developers conference in San Francisco, where the company will unveil a revamped streaming-music service, improvements to its mobile software and tools to speed up smartwatch applications. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg *** Local Caption *** Jennifer Bailey
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

On Thursday, many customers were unable to sign in to their iCloud accounts or access related services, which Apple tracked on its system status page.

Twitter carried accounts of customers who were temporarily unable to check out at some Apple Stores during the midday outage, according to a Macrumors report. Apple did not return a request for comment.

Visa had a multinational processing outage in June 2018, and Mastercard suffered a serious outage in the U.K. about a year ago. Target had back-to-back payment system glitches one weekend last month, crippling its in-store checkout systems nationwide.

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