iTunes and App Store Down for 11 Hours; Apple Loses $2.3 Million an Hour

After Apple’s digital marketplaces, iTunes and the App Store, went down yesterday, the company lost over $2.3 million an hour.

iPhone App Store logo

Thursday was a total nightmare for everyone with an Apple product as all of Apple’s digital marketplaces experienced heavy outages. For approximately 11 hours, iTunes and the App Store were both unavailable, even the Mac App Store and the iBooks Store were down. For this duration, the millions of people around the world who own Apple products were unable to buy songs, music, books or any other digital content. In short, it was a total disaster.

So why were all of Apple’s services down? The company explained in the following statement that it was down to a DNS (Domain Name Server) error:

“We apologise to our customers experiencing problems with iTunes and other services this morning. The cause was an internal DNS [domain name system] error at Apple. We’re working to make all of the services available to customers as soon as possible, and we thank everyone for their patience.”

Never mind that this is a PR nightmare for the company as one of the smartest technological companies on the planet can’t fix a problem like this quickly but it also had serious financial ramifications for the company. According to calculations by the International Business Times, for every single hour that Apple’s digital storefronts were down, the company lost just over $2.3 million. Multiply that by 11 and Apple incurred losses of $25 million altogether.

For Apple, this is just a drop of water in the ocean. Not only is the company the richest one on the planet right now but it also has around $120 billion saved up so losses of $25 million are nothing to them. This is perhaps a bit more worrying for the content creators who depend on these stores for their income but perhaps Apple will do them a solid and will reimburse them.

Source: IBM

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