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San Francisco - Apple's widely used iTunes and app stores suffered a rare breakdown Wednesday, frustrating millions of music lovers and mobile device owners around the world.
The iPhone and iPad maker confirmed the outages in a post on its status notification page without providing any cause for the problem as of 13:00. By then, the both the iTunes and app stores had been inaccessible for several hours to the exasperation of Apple users venting on social media and various online forums.
Apple didn't respond to inquiries about the outages.
Besides the iTunes and mobile app stores, Apple's online book store and app store for its Mac computers weren't working either.
The disruption affects some of the world's most widely used - and most profitable services.
About 800 million accounts with credit cards linked to them have been set up on Apple's iTunes store since it opened in 2003 to sell digital music for the company's iPods.
More than 75 billion apps have been downloaded from the store that Apple opened in 2008 for the iPhone and, later, the iPad. Many of those apps charge a fee, or generate revenue from purchases of other services while people are using the programme.
Last year, Apple's revenue from its iTunes, app, iBook, Mac app stores and other services totalled $18.5bn, or an average of $50m per day. That's still a small fraction of Apple's total revenue of $200bn during that period.
The outages also will cut into the sale mobile app developers who keep most of the revenue from the programmes sold in the app store. Last year alone, Apple distributed $10bn to mobile app developers, an average of about $27m per day.
The global outage comes two day after Apple unveiled its latest technology, the Apple Watch.
Apple, based in Cupertino, California, is hoping to attract even more traffic to its app store next month when the smart watch goes on sale.
The company's stock slipped 60 cents to $123.91 in early afternoon trading Wednesday.
