Apple Music down for hours as Apple flags ongoing issue
Apple Music is down for an unknown number of users on Thursday – the outage now in its fourth hour, and with no restoration timeline in sight.
Image by gguy | Shutterstock
Apple Music is down for an unknown number of users on Thursday. The outage now in its fourth hour, and with no restoration timeline in sight.
- Apple Music stayed down for hours Thursday, with Apple listing the issue as ongoing and no fix timeline in sight.
- The outage appears to be affecting only some users, but it still hit one of Apple’s biggest consumer services.
- The disruption also followed earlier issues with iTunes and other Apple services, making for a rocky day across Apple's system status page.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
Apple’s System Status page showed issues began with the music streaming service at 4:59 p.m. Pacific Time (PT) / 7:59 p.m. Eastern Time (ET) – notably the only Apple system currently having issues out of a list of 78 services.
Labeled as “ongoing,” the status description states “Some users are affected” and “The service may be unavailable or slow for some users.”
So far, Apple has not said what is behind the service disruption or given an estimate of when the issues might be resolved.
User reports remain limited
Internet monitoring site Downdetector shows no spike in reports over the last 24 hours, but it does list audio streaming as the most-reported issue among Apple Music users at 44%.
Another 34% have reported issues with the app itself, and 18% said they had problems with the server connection.
Usually bombarded with complaints when an app goes down, even X has been fairly quiet about the outage, leading Cybernews to assume the number of Apple Music users impacted by the hours-long interruption may be fairly low.
Other Apple services saw earlier issues
Earlier in the day, the iTunes Store was also reported as having issues affecting “some users” from 7:00 a.m. - 2:15 p.m. PT. Those issues have since been resolved.
The Apple School Manager and Volume Purchase Program both showed early-morning service issues for a brief period, which have been resolved.
At $10.99 per month, Apple Music has roughly 108 million paid subscribers as of January 2026 – the second-largest streaming platform after Spotify, according to SK Magazine.
More than 37% of Apple Music’s total user base is in the US, equal to nearly 40 million subscribers, it said.
Major music platforms have gone down before
Apple Music, along with several other services, including the App Store, Apple TV+, and Apple Fitness+, briefly went down across the US and other global regions in 2024.
In December 2025, Spotify experienced a massive outage, hitting thousands of users in the US, the UK, and parts of Europe.
Earlier that spring, the Apple Music streaming competitor also went down for nearly half a day, leaving outraged Spotify music fans in the US and Britain angry for days.
Boasting a library of over 100-million songs, music videos, and other exclusive content, Apple Music is currently available in 173 countries.
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