Your Apple Maps, App Store, iCloud Mail and auxiliary Apple services galore may have hit the skids for a few hours Monday morning, and while the temporary outage was international, most everything is back up and running.  

Fresh on the heels of Wednesday’s Google Maps outage, their rival Apple was slapped with their own international outage Monday morning. The Verge reports that a Monday morning (Pacific Time) Apple outage took many Apple apps and services down, which “included iMessage, some Apple Maps services, iCloud Mail, iCloud Keychain, the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, and Podcasts,” among others.

The outages started around 9 a.m. PT Monday morning, and do appear to be resolved at this time. According to data from the website DownDetector, the typical life cycle of Monday’s outages peaked at 10:06 a.m. PT, then quickly dropped precipitously, and by about 1 p.m. PT there were a negligible number of outages. While the scope was international, some Apple users had no outages at all.

Apple has not yet commented publicly on the cause of the outages. But according to the Chronicle, a few other tech companies experienced outages at the same time. “A handful of other companies, including T-Mobile, PayPal and Amazon Web Services, appeared to also be experiencing reports of outages, according to Downdetector data, though those, too, were on a downward trend,” according to the Chron.

It is, perhaps, only a coincidence that these outages come the same day that President Biden was warning the private sector to harden their defenses against potential cyberattacks from Russia.

Apple’s System Status Page shows that about half, but not all public-facing Apple apps had an outage Monday, but are now marked as “Resolved Outage.” That doesn’t tell the whole story.

Apple had internal company problems too, and the Varge’s article has a slideshow showing that a staggering number of Apple products had widespread trouble Monday morning.

I’m sure it sucks if your iCloud Keychain is not working, as you could be locked out of apps or unable to use your Apple Pay. But given what went out, this could have been worse. (Recall that in October’s Facebook outage, employee keychains weren't working and people couldn't get in to fix the servers.)  

But in what is surely the most hilarious aspect to this outage, some employees at Apple stores had to manually write up sales receipts on paper.

Related: Facebook Employee ID Badges Weren’t Working Today, So They Couldn’t Get In to Fix the Outage

Image: Apple via Facebook