If Apple Music felt a little off on Monday night, you weren’t imagining things. Reports of problems with the streaming service spiked on Downdetector late on January 20, suggesting Apple Music may have been experiencing a wider disruption.
Just after 8 p.m. Eastern Time in the United States, more than 1,000 outage reports had been logged, a sharp jump from the site’s usual baseline of around two reports. By 10 p.m. ET, the number had dipped slightly but was still hovering around 850, which suggests the issue wasn’t fully resolved at that point.
Downdetector’s outage map showed reports clustered around major cities, like New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle, pointing to a nationwide rather than regional problem. Interestingly, Apple’s own system status page didn’t list Apple Music as down. Still, it did show outages affecting other services, including the App Store, Apple TV, iTunes Store, and Maps traffic.
Apple TV, in particular, saw a sharp spike, with more than 3,000 outage reports just after 9:30 p.m. ET, before tapering off closer to 10 p.m. At the time of this report, no official explanation has been shared yet.
The timing is also notable, coming shortly after a major Verizon outage affected many of the same regions. Whether the two events are related isn’t clear, but together they’ve added to a rough few days for digital services in the U.S.
This story is still developing, so expect updates once Apple responds.
Emmanuel Umahi
