18 out of 36 services were down for some users, mostly in the United States

Aug 21, 2014 20:00 GMT  ·  By
iOS and OS X users in the United States have experienced a strange problem with iCloud. For no apparent reason, the services were down for an hour and a half. 
 
Apple acknowledged the issue shortly and the iCloud System status page displayed the areas were there were known issues. According to people experiencing the problem, iCloud was having issues all over the United States.

People from Michigan, Virginia, Southern California or Texas reported issues with passwords rejected when trying to enter their accounts or syncing issues on the Mac. Others said they were not able to sign in and were getting a "Connection Error" message on iCloud.com

 
According to Apple's dedicated page, there were issues with Back to My Mac, Documents in the Cloud, Find my Friends, all iCloud syncing related services, iMovie Theater, iWork for iCloud and Photo sharing. Interestingly enough, this latest outage did not affect iMessage, FaceTime or iTunes so communications and services like iTunes in the Cloud or iTunes Radio were working just fine.
 
In such cases, it is better to just wait for the service to come back to life. iCloud syncs the info using the latest one added so if you add a contact on a Mac, and because it is not synced to your iPhone, you add it there, with different info, iCloud will compare the two and use only the latest info. This may result in information loss. 
 
Apple has recently added new iCloud data centers in China and Brazil. Also, their largest data center in the United States is powered by green, solar energy.