It looks like both the iMessage and FaceTime services are down for some users worldwide, although North America seems to be hit the hardest by the outage. It’s also worth noting that iMessage experienced a brief outage on October 25th and another back in mid-September. I’m in Chicago and cannot currently send iMessages to my contacts; however, I wasn’t affected by last week’s outage.
Since details are scarce, rumors are pointing to Apple’s data center in North Carolina getting slammed by Hurricane Sandy to be the cause of the outage. Hurricane Sandy tore through the East Coast last night and is currently affecting many websites like Gizmodo and Squarespace. Apple could very likely be in the process or migrating iMessage to another server farm on the west coast or elsewhere. Apple has not yet commented on the outage and is still showing that all of its services are online on their iCloud status page.
Could be back up any moment, or any day now… we’re not really sure at this point.
