Short but widespread outage affected almost every Apple online service

Yesterday Apple online services were unstable or unresponsive for couple of hours. Affected services included iMessage, iCloud (including third-party apps integrations), App Store, iCloud Mail, Apple Music and many others.

Outage also affected Apple Store systems significantly affecting retail sales.

Outage was resolved within hours, Apple did not comment on root causes though.

Apple System Status:

• System Status
• Developer System Status

Reference:

• iCloud and Many Other Apple Services Are Down
• iCloud and Many Other Apple Services Are Down or Experiencing Issues [Resolved]
• PSA: Apple services including iMessage, Apple Music, iCloud, and more are currently down [U]
• Widespread Apple Services Outage