iMessage suffered an outage but is now back

On Thursday night, many iPhone owners (including some here at On the edge) saw the “not delivered” flag when trying to send texts via iMessage. People have reported the issue across multiple wireless carriers (Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile), countries, and even continents.

The Apple Services status page showed no indication of a problem while the issues were happening, but has now been updated after the fact, reflecting a resolved issue where “Users were unable to use this service” for iMessage, Apple Messages for Business, FaceTime and HomeKit. According to the note, the problems continued from 5:39 pm ET to 6:35 pm ET.

Apple did not respond to questions or comment on the matter; however, judging by our usage and reports on social media, everything appears to be working again. However, if your international friends still say, “Just use WhatsApp!” there’s really nothing we can do about it.

Update, May 16: Noted that the problem appears to be resolved.