Mere hours after a significant iMessage and FaceTime outage, Apple’s iTunes Match is unavailable for some users on Monday morning.
The latest iCloud outage discovered by AppleInsider was still in effect as of around 8 a.m. Eastern. Attempts to play or download iTunes Match content via an iOS device or Mac was not operational.
Despite this issue affecting multiple users, Apple’s iCloud website still advertised that all services are functional. It only acknowledged that “some” users were affected by an iMessage and FaceTime outage as of Sunday evening.
Attempts to play various songs on my iPhone 5 from my iTunes Match account this morning (10 AM Eastern) were met with various levels of success. Most would not play, with tracks sitting at “0:00” with no error messages, while some would play, and others would play but not respond to controls. Tapping the “pause” icon would not pause the song. Case in point, “YMCA” by the Village People. (Don’t judge me!)
iTunes Match is a paid service that users pay $24.99 per year to use. It recently celebrated its first birthday getting presents to the tune of $24.99 as renewal fee from users. (Mine was automatically charged and paid this weekend.) While iMessage and FaceTime are free services, and the adage is “You get what you pay for,” iTunes Match should be held to a higher standard.
The service allows users to store their personal music collection in Apple’s iCloud, giving remote access to song files that were not purchased through the iTunes Music Store.
The most recent outages were the fourth of their kind in the past three months. One occurred in September, and two in October. FaceTime calls were completely unavailable Sunday, (I was however, able to make a FaceTime call late Sunday evening with a good quality connection), while iMessages from an iPhone simply reverted to SMS to go through.
As a side note, a song I attempted to play when beginning to write this article approximately a half an hour ago has suddenly began to play. Controls were unresponsive, and I had to kill the app to get the music to stop paying.
How about you readers? Have you experienced any problems playing your music from iTunes Match on you iOS device or Mac this morning? Let us know in the comments section below.
