Several services linked to Apple’s iCloud including key features like e-mail, were running extremely slowly on Thursday, according to a flood of complaints from users on Twitter. Test e-mails I sent to my own .me account either took roughly-half an hour to arrive or didn't come through at all.
Apple confirmed on its system status dashboard that many iCloud services were experiencing slow response times.
The features affected are iCloud Mail, iCloud Drive, Find my iPhone, Back to My Mac, iCloud Keychain, Photos, Documents in the Cloud and iWork for iCloud beta.
Apple’s Dashboard doesn’t show how many users are affected, or for how long the the slow-down has taken place. However a post from 9to5Mac on Thursday morning New York time suggested the service had been running slowly for the past four hours.
iCloud has an estimated 500 million account holders, according to Horace Dediu, co-founder of software consulting firm Asymco.
Dediu estimates that iCloud contributes about $1 billion in sales per quarter to Apple’s total revenue or about $8 per user, per year.
The last time Apple publicly gave stats about iCloud was in the second quarter of 2013, when the company said it had 300 million users, representing a 20% increase over the quarter alone.
iCloud is primarily used as a means to store documents and photos, send data to others, or back up devices and manage their data if an Apple device is lost or stolen.
In 2012 iCloud suffered an outage that shut down email for 1.1% of its users over several days, prompting Apple to send a letter of apology to customers who were affected.
In March 2015 Apple suffered another outage lasting 12 hours, which left customers temporarily unable to access its iTunes and iBooks stores.
