The App Store is Down (For Now)

Only for some users, and probably only for a short time

By
Rob LeFebvre
Rob LeFebvre
Rob LeFebvre
Associate Editorial Director, News
  • UCLA
  • California State University, Northridge
Rob LeFebvre is the Associate Editorial Director, News for Lifewire. He has been a technology writer for more than 12 years with articles appearing in 148Apps, Cult of Mac, Engadget, and more.
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Updated on January 24, 2020 01:11PM EST

What: Apple's App Store suffered a notable outage midday on Friday.

How: Some couldn't load the App Store. Others could not download.

Why Do You Care: The App Store is your primary avenue to new apps, app updates, and in-app purchases. If it's offline, none of that's available to you. BTW: We're pretty sure it's all back now.

It’s not just you.

One of the advantages of having such a deep well of articles about technology here at Lifewire is the ability to see what’s happening in the world based on which of our articles starts to get unusually high traffic.

App Store problems last 24 hours
DownDetector.com

Today, we noticed an article about iPhones not downloading apps rise to the top of our current traffic. A quick check of Downdetector.com (a website dedicated to knowing what internet sites are experiencing trouble) showed us that the App Store went down a couple of hours ago. It’s still struggling even now, though Lifewire staffers seem to be able to download and update apps.

Apple’s own status page says that the App Store is having an issue, which affects “some users.” 

Apple.com System Status page for App Store
Apple

Typically, these sorts of outages are taken care of quickly enough by Apple; chances are the App Store will be back up soon. Until then, you can see if it’s out for you by trying to download or update apps on your iOS device of choice. 

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