Apple iCloud Mail Goes Down, Company Remains Tight-lipped on the Cause

Apple has gotten everyone used to not saying a single thing about incidents affecting its products and services, but the latest iCloud Mail downtime happened at a time when an explanation would really come in handy.

The mail service suffered an outage a few hours ago, with several users living in different parts of the world confirming on Twitter that logging in was no longer possible on iCloud.com. Furthermore, email clients configured to pull messages from iCloud Mail accounts also returned errors due to a cause that Apple hasn’t disclosed.

“Can’t load Mail. There was a problem loading the application,” read the message displayed to users trying to authenticate on iCloud.com, while email clients pointed to a problem with the mail server, indicating that the “service might be temporarily unavailable.”

While the email service returned to a working state shortly after the outage, Apple has remained completely tight-lipped on what exactly happened, with not even the company’s system status webpage revealing the downtime experienced by the Mail service.

Furthermore, Apple’s support accounts, including those on Twitter, said no outage occurred, even though screenshots posted by users clearly indicated they weren’t able to log into their accounts due to a server-side problem.

Apple developer site down earlier this week

And what’s worse is that this outage comes only a day after the company’s developer service suffered a glitch which was described by many as a possible breach. Developer accounts were updated with home address information pointing to a location in Russia, which obviously led many to thinking that Apple’s service might had been breached by Russian hackers.

The company, however, said in a statement that no such breach occurred and it was all caused by an internal error, despite all the signs pointing to unusual activity with the accounts.

As with many other things Apple, we’ll never know what caused today’s mail service outage, and everything seems to be running normally at the time of publishing this article.