This is what I think is the bigger news and deserves far bigger pressure than the downtime. Server downtime can always occur, but then you need to inform your paying customers (such as developers whose apps are counting on your services!) what the issue is. If you are paranoid and don't want to reveal information (for example if it is due to a hack of some kind), you AT LEAST should say something along the lines of "we know there are issues, we are on it."...
But it is absolutely unacceptable and inexcusable to have hours of downtime and have BOTH your end-user and developer status page still be completely green across the board.
Tried to contact Apple via: https://www.apple.com/support/contact/ (As mentioned on the bottom of the page: "If you are experiencing an issue not listed here, contact support"), but that does not seem to work.
Perhaps coincidentally I received an unknown charge from iTunes at 1:13am. Since I do not remember making this purchase I would really like to see what was purchased. Unfortunately the store is down.
I'm not sure if it's as simple as that, certainly OSX has been poorly neglected with 10.10 but generally their cloud services are rock solid (at least in Australia) where Microsofts alternatives suffer from weekly unexplained outages and poor performance on a global level. The number of Amazon instances that crash and fail to ever come back or new instances that start broken is also often dismissed it seems.
Rubbish. I just sold the kids' MacBooks and iPads because iCloud and Pages/Numbers is a piece of shit from a reliability perspective. Add to that the WiFi stopped working reliably with 10.10.
iMessage still suffers from massive consistency failures; due to the incoming messages not being chronologically ordered even small network glitches mean things get confusing fast. iCloud at least in part seems to run on Microsoft Azure, amusingly enough.
I'm not questioning your anecdata, but (to offer some of my own) I have never experienced this and none of the people I work with or socialise with have ever brought it up. I only hear people on the internet talking about it as if it's true of the service as a whole. It definitely isn't.
It’s weird seeing specific services slowly get the red flag on the status page that have seemingly all gone down at the same time.
I can’t listen to any of my music from iTunes Match, which still shows Green on the status page. But I get an error about the iTunes Store not being able to process purchases (???) when I try to listen to my music, where iTunes Store does show a red flag. So the status page is telling a half-truth. What a mess.
It seems that the "Detailed Timeline" at the bottom shows an outage for "iCloud Account & Sign In" earlier today. That is probably the issue for the original post.
Actually it's not showing outages. They're showing them as "service issues" (yellow), not "outages" (red). Same as Amazon when their EBS or whatever is on fire they show it as a green check with a small blue "(i)" instead of a proper red "it's down".
Why is so hard for service providers to admit that things are broken? Is it an attempt to weasel out of SLA uptime promises?
edit: Apple just updated the page to show nice big red outages. Kudos! Hopefully they have learned from whatever kept the status page from updating and it keeps working going forward.
[Update 15:02 11-03-2015, GMT+1]
* iTunes Store - All users are affected
* iCloud Account & Sign In - All users were affected
* iCloud Mail - All users were affected