Having Trouble With Apple Music Today? It’s Not Just You
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If Apple Music isn’t working for you right now, you can probably stop troubleshooting the app on your iPhone or Mac, as the service is actually experiencing broader interruption.
As spotted by 9to5Mac, Apple’s System Status page is reporting an Apple Music “Outage” that’s been ongoing since 11:40 a.m. Eastern Time. While it’s unclear how widespread this is, and Apple says only “some users are affected,” the red alert triangle suggests it’s a bit more serious than usual.
Downdetector has also shown a spike in reports over the past few hours. To be fair, that’s only peaked at around 238, but we’re not sure if that’s simply a representation of how few Apple Music users are likely to bother reporting the outage on the service compared to more traditional web-based services.
While Apple’s services are typically quite reliable, Apple Music has been hit by an unusual number of outages over the past few months, including two in April within only days of each other.
It’s hard to say how long this will take to resolve, although Downdetector reports are already on a downward trend from their peak at around 1:39 p.m. An outage on April 16 lasted for over 19 hours, from around 5 p.m. ET until noon the following day, coming after a separate issue with the iTunes Store that may have been related. Apple Music went down again only three days later, although in this case it was back up and running in just under six hours.
Again, the issue isn’t affecting everyone, and Apple also says those who are experiencing problems may be doing so intermittently. As with previous outages, if you’ve downloaded your favorite music to your iPhone or other Apple device for offline listening, these problems are far less likely to impact you, as you don’t need an internet connection to listen.
Still, we’ve seen some issues in the past where it’s been necessary to turn on Airplane Mode to prevent the Music app from trying to phone home to a broken Apple Music back-end.
Apple Music has been so remarkably stable over the years that this latest increase in disruptions leaves us wondering if they’re all related in some way, such as Apple battling some ongoing server-side stability issues or performing major infrastructure updates — perhaps even paving the way for some of the new AI features it plans to announce at next month’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).
For instance, it may not be a coincidence that these outages have increased since the company rolled out Playlist Playground less than two months ago in iOS 26.4. For now, that feature is limited to Apple Music users with US accounts, but Apple could be preparing to roll it out more widely — or, conversely, struggling with it so much that we may not see it expand for a while.
The grass also isn’t necessarily greener on the other side of the streaming fence. Those firmly entrenched in Apple Music aren’t likely paying as much attention to Spotify, but the rival service has had more than its own share of outages that have also been elevated in recent months. In Spotify’s case, that’s likely spurred on by the company’s expansion into new areas like lossless music, background downloads, and podcasts and audio articles.
