Is iCloud down?

If you’re experiencing difficulties connecting to iCloud from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, then it could be that the service is having issues with its servers or systems. There’s little you can do to fix this, but you can at least confirm the outage and then monitor its progress so you’ll know when the service is working again. We’ll show you how.

For more top tips on all things iOS, take a look at how to use iCloud Drive and for those that want to escape the walled garden, best alternatives to iCloud. 

Is iCloud down? 

Check Apple’s System Status

The best place to go when you suspect iCloud might be struggling is Apple’s own System Status webpage. This is a detailed list of all the online services provided by Apple, with details on the current status of each element and notifications of any planned maintenance.

Alongside the different services in iCloud it also lets you know the current operating status of Apple Pay, the App Store, Maps, Siri, and others. This can be very useful if you’re trying to diagnose an issue with your device. Try navigating to the page and then making it a bookmark in your browser so you can quickly check whenever you suspect there’s a problem.

Check an independent status site

While the Apple System Status site is useful, what if the problem that’s affecting iCloud is also causing issues for the webpage? In this case, you can visit one of several independent status sites that monitor online activity across the web.

Probably the most famous, mainly due to its excellent name, is www.isitdownrightnow.com. When you arrive on this page you can search for whichever site or service you suspect is faltering and be presented with the results in seconds. These include a detailed rundown of how the site has been performing over the last few hours, alongside information of the last time it was down.

Another portal that offers the same kind of information is Down Detector. This again provides current status information, recent activity, as well as the most common problems users are experiencing and even a world map showing live outage data.

Visitors can also leave comments so that others will know that they are not alone in their digital plight. 

So, if you can’t access your Apple Music files, Siri is out to lunch, or your iCloud documents are unreachable, now you’ll be able to quickly find out if it’s Apple’s fault. Of course if iCloud is reporting back as fine then you might need to visit an Apple Store to see if the problem is hardware related.

Before you head off though there are a few things you can try. First of all make sure that you’re running the latest version of your machine’s operating system. Do this by going to the App store on your Mac or Settings>General>Software on your iOS device and seeing if there are any updates listed. If there isn’t then maybe try some of our iCloud help guides listed below to see if it’s a simple problem that you can solve yourself.