iCloud Drive, Notes, Photos, and iCloud Backup Experiencing Issues [Update: Fixed]

Wednesday February 3, 2021 10:56 am PST by Juli Clover

Several of Apple's services are experiencing an outage at the current time, with Apple noting service interrupts for iCloud Backup, iCloud Drive, ‌iCloud‌ Notes, ‌iCloud‌ Storage Upgrades, and Photos on its System Status page.

icloud services issue
The issue has been ongoing since approximately 10:13 a.m. Pacific Time. Apple says that users may be unable to use these services during the outage, so features like ‌iCloud‌ Backup and ‌iCloud‌ photo storage may not be working at this time.

There's no word on when these problems will be resolved, but we'll update this article when everything is back up and running. Earlier today, services like the App Store, Apple Music, and iTunes Store, also saw an outage that has since been addressed.

Update: The problem has also expanded to ‌iCloud‌ Storage, Calendar, Mail, Keychain, and Bookmarks.

Update 2: According to Apple's System Status page, all of the issues have now been fixed and Apple's service are back up and running.

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Top Rated Comments

jonnysods

74 months ago

Why does Apple have these kinds of issues yet Google’s services don’t?

They do - there was a big outage 2-3 weeks ago for email and chat I believe, was a pretty big issue for our clients for an hour or so.

Score: 14 Votes (Like | Disagree)

adamw

74 months ago

A prime example of why you should not place critical files in the cloud for storage without a local backup.

Score: 14 Votes (Like | Disagree)

CJ Dorschel

74 months ago

Meanwhile, Apple wants to push backups to the cloud which is one of the many reasons Time Machine was stripped of the ability to recover lost emails and contacts, etc within core apps (no, Catalina’s separate volumes is not the cause, I’ve been working with Apple engineers on this issue since day 1 and it seems Apple has wanted to push time machine features to the cloud but backed off as users and developers complained). One of the other reasons Apple left the networking market and Time Capsule’s - it seems Apple wants to push backups into their cloud services as iCloud storage increases and Apple focuses on services.

I don’t understand why Apple couldn’t leave Time Machine alone and simply add the ability for cloud backups in addition to local. One or the other doesn’t make sense.

Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Attirex

74 months ago

Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)

nt5672

74 months ago

Why does Apple have these kinds of issues yet Google’s services don’t?

Apple has never been able to get shared services right. Everything Apple does is to support the keynote. The fact that something might not work doesn't matter because Apple will spend enough money on making a fashion statement that the masses will never know.

Just think about Time Machine. You never got an error, but one day Time Machine decides that your back up is no good and it needs to start over. How long has it been no good. Never mind that it is a bad time to lose your backup. Never mind that it has not been backing up for weeks, with no notice all you backups are gone.

Remember when Apple used to mean "It just works!", now that means "Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil". Which in Apple parlance means, "Detect no errors, show no errors, acknowledge no errors". Unfortunately, Apple's software quality has not kept up with the marketing hoopla.

Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)