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Apple gradually restores multiple services knocked offline

By Trevor Mogg September 29, 2020

Multiple Apple services suffered a serious outage Tuesday night, with iCloud, the App Store, Apple TV+, Apple Music, and Apple Arcade among those that were knocked offline for several hours.

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The problems appeared to begin at around 9 p.m. ET. The tech company has yet to say what caused the issue.

The latest updates regarding the ongoing disruption can be viewed on Apple’s Status Page. Shortly before midnight on Tuesday, the site suggested that all affected services were operating as usual again.

Digital Trends has reached out to Apple for more information on what happened and we will update this article when we hear back.

The outage came a day after multiple Microsoft services were temporarily knocked out by a glitch. The issue impacted Microsoft 365 and related cloud-based services such as Office.com, Outlook.com, Teams, and OneDrive.

Facebook and Instagram are among other high-profile platforms that have recently suffered disruption.

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Contributing Editor

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

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Apple quietly retires one of its Apple Music tiers

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Apple is retiring its Voice plan for Apple Music that lets people use Siri to select tracks for $5 a month -- less than half the cost of the regular plan.

The tech giant introduced its most affordable Apple Music plan in 2021 but on Wednesday said in a message on its website that it’s ending the ability to sign up to it with immediate effect.

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No, you can’t use an Apple gift card on Apple Pay

Photo of Apple gift cards.

A viral TikTok has made the internet rounds, showing a person who thought that they could transfer Apple gift card funds to Apple Pay. After buying a $300 Apple gift card, however, they quickly learned that that's simply not possible. While their choice might seem misguided in hindsight, there are plenty of people who have been left confused about the differences between Apple gift cards and Apple Pay.

While having a $300 Apple gift card certainly has its uses — such as buying 10 years of Apple Music, as the original poster jokingly pointed out — it's certainly not the same as having that same money to spend freely with Apple Pay. To avoid making the same mistake as this TikTok user, make sure that you understand the distinctions between the two Apple services, as it might just save you $300 (or more).
You cannot add Apple gift cards to Apple Pay