14 DAY TRIAL // Apple’s iCloud Backup service is down right now, with problems first detected nearly 24 hours ago, but expanding for users across the world in the last few hours.
Little is known at this point about the causes of the outage, but Apple itself has confirmed the problems on the system status page, saying that iCloud Backup programs first started on June 27, with only a few users affected at first.
Of course, Apple downplays the outage at this time too, saying that “less than 1 percent of users are affected,” but this is undoubtedly a big problem for customers who wanted to create iCloud backups and set up new devices using their backups.
While most people would think that Apple’s iCloud Backup service is down because of a cyber-attack, there’s absolutely no evidence that this is the case, with Apple remaining completely tight-lipped on such details.
Switch to iTunes backups
The company, however, acknowledges that “users may be unable to restore from an iCloud backup,” and this is mostly frustrating when it comes to setting up new devices. Apple customers buying new iPhones can’t use iClouds to move data from one device to another, and the workaround in this case is to switch to iTunes backups that are stored locally to migrate data.
We’ll be keeping an eye on how Apple addresses the problem in the coming hours, but for the moment, turning to iTunes for backups and restoring seems to be the better option, especially because addressing the outage appears to be taking more time than expected.
All the other services appear to be working correctly, according to Apple’s system status page, and the other iCloud services are also up and running, including iCloud Mail, iCloud accounts and sign in, and iCloud storage upgrades. This is most likely a server issue and a fix should be only a few hours away.