Apple subject to online services faults

Apple's share price fell by 1.82 per cent on Thursday (March 12th) after the company experienced a number of service outages.

The company was struck by a fault which prevented users from downloading new material from Apple's iOS App Store, Mac App Store, iTunes music and video marketplace and iBook shops. Users were also prevented from updating any of their existing files. The company confirmed that the problem persisted for over 11 hours and affected customers across the globe.

A spokesman for Apple confirmed that the issue had been caused by the firm's own engineers, which also affected users' ability to access their emails and documents stored on the Apple iCloud for four hours. The issue has since been rectified across all of the company's apps and services.

The spokesman said: "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."

Apple's recent financial statements highlighted that its online media stores made the company $1.2 million (£800,000) an hour in the past three months. This totalled a huge $2.6 billion in this relatively short timeframe.

Record quarterly profit

Apple set a new record in January when it posted a net profit of $18 billion for its first fiscal quarter. It represented the highest ever figure made by a public company during a single quarter and smashed the previous record of $15.9 billion held by ExxonMobil from the second quarter of 2012.

The Californian tech-giant highlighted its App Store as being one of the key drivers for success. iPhone and Mac sales also brought in record revenue sales, with the former selling 74.5 million units in the past quarter alone.