Stop trying to force quit apps or restart your phone, it isn’t going to help. It’s not just you, Apple’s Weather app is down right now. There were some sporadic issues yesterday, but it seems more widespread this morning.
Whether it’s on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac — the back-end service running Apple’s Weather app seems to be having issues loading data. Sometimes the home screen widget won’t work; other times you’ll get one or two locations in your list to update, but not the rest. Other times it all looks good, but the hour-by-hour forecast details aren’t working. That’s frustrating!
This is one of those times where the usually-helpful Downdetector website doesn’t help us aggregate issues because this isn’t an app or service you can track … it’s just built into every iPhone, iPad, and Mac (on later macOS versions, at least). Apple’s system status dashboard page acknowledges that there’s an ongoing issue with Weather now, stating that “Some users are affected. This service may be slow or unavailable.”
And if you check out Twitter, it seems like the issues are annoyingly sporadic. There are a lot of people out there who don’t have access to their Weather info, but plenty more who don’t see an issue at all. And there doesn’t seem to be a clear trend as to why.
Now’s a perfect time to remember that things with the Apple Weather app were supposed to get better after the company’s acquisition of the much-loved Dark Sky app. Sure we got a full-featured Weather app on iPadOS and macOS, which was a bonus and years behind when it should have arrived. But … that doesn’t do us a whole lot of good when the app won’t load now, does it?
For now, check in with some of the other popular weather apps and websites. There’s Weather Channel, AccuWeather, Wunderground, Carrot Weather, and many more. Most of the good ones require a purchase or subscription, and you may find that worth it in the long run — particularly if Apple isn’t able to keep its Weather app operational.