Global outage hits Apple App, iTunes stores

Customers around the world were unable to make purchases or download apps and content from Apple's App and iTunes stores overnight following a large-scale service disruption.

The outage started before midnight AEST and lasted for around nine hours.

Apple confirmed on its system status page that "customers may be unable to make purchases from the App Store, iTunes Store, iBooks Store or Mac App Store."

While the online stores were accessible, apps and content could not be bought and downloaded.

Apple's Software Update on its OS X operating system also went down, preventing users from obtaining the recently released security patches for the FREAK SSL/TLS flaw.

The problem appears to also have affected physical Apple stores, which reportedly had to resort to manual credit card swiping machines to complete transactions.

@brokenbottleboy Never thought I would see one of these old school card machines in the Apple Store in B'ham, UK! �� pic.twitter.com/fj0i9jOu7I

— Nathan Ziabek (@NathanJozef) March 11, 2015

Credit: Nathan Ziabek via Twitter

The company said an internal domain name system (DNS) error was behind the problem, but did not elaborate further or provide an estimated time for service restoration.

"We apologise to our customers experiencing problems with iTunes and other services this morning," Apple said in a statement to media.

"The cause was an internal DNS 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."

The service issues come two days after Apple release its highly-anticipated Watch wearable, new MacBook and upgrades to its existing line of notebooks.