Apple App Store and iTunes down for users around the world

UPDATE 16:00 - It looks like both stores are now back online and we have been able to update and download apps onto an iPhone 6 without issue. We will update this post if the situation changes, or if Apple issues a statement.

Apple's App Store and iTunes appear to be suffering from significant issues as content is missing and users report problems when downloading content.

According to the website Down Detector, reports of problems with iTunes spiked at 3pm (GMT) on Wednesday, 25 March, with reports concentrated in western Europe and North America.

Apple's own status page suggests there is no problem with any of its services, but as we saw with a significant outage on 11 March, this pages takes several hours to update after a problem is reported.

Many Twitter users are reporting seeing this image when they are trying to access content on one of Apple's services:

On 11 March almost all of Apple's online stores and services were affected by a major outage which lasted 11 hours in total. Among the services affected were the App Store, iTunes Store, iBooks Store and Mac App Store. The company apologised to customers saying:

"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."

It is unclear if the latest outage has anything to do with the DNS error.

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