Apple’s ability to operate an effective cloud seems to be not perfect – the entire system crashed for hours recently. iCloud faced a huge outage with its services like iMessage, Photo Stream and Backup & Restore.

iCloud system status webpage admitted that the downtime has continued for almost 12 hours. The tech giant lost its iCloud Documents, Photo Stream, iPhoto Journals, and Backup & Restore services, while iMessage users also experienced some trouble and couldn’t send or download attachments. Users also complained they couldn’t create a new Apple ID.

The Apple tried to defend itself, claiming as usual that just a small percentage of users were affected by the outage. The company always says that any problem only affects a small number of users even if it is not true. Now the tech giant claimed only 1% of users had noticed any difference. However, one should take into account that there are 300 million members on the iCloud, so the company is still talking about 3 million users.

By the way, this is not the first time that iCloud has been broken – back in June over 20% of users suffered from downtime. Taking into account that the cloud is supposed to grant immunity from downtime, Apple seems to be doing everything wrong, especially since it took so long to get up and running again. Although Amazon and Google also had their own cloud outages, their services were down for minutes, not hours.