A widespread but apparently brief outage was reported to have affected Apples online digital storefronts this morning, such as the App Store, iTunes Store and Mac App Store. The problem appeared to occur worldwide, but Apple's
System Status Page did not acknowledge the issue until hours after it was resolved, which occurred at approximately 8:30AM Pacific. The company suffered a much longer and more severe outage just
two weeks ago.
Users who may still be experiencing issues with App Store or iTunes applications on OS X or iOS are advised to force-quit the applications (on Mac) or manually close them (on iOS) and re-open to resolve the issues, which resulted in broken searches, missing graphics and problems with downloading new content or purchases.
The longer outage from two weeks ago was blamed on internal DNS issues, and had much more of a far-reaching impact. Apart from finally acknowledging that all users were affected by the roughly 40-minute outage today, the company has said nothing about what caused the issue.