Apple TV suffers embarrassing outage as ‘Pluribus’ launches

After months of buildup and an omnipresent advertising campaign, Apple’s much-anticipated new show Pluribus made its debut on the company’s TV streaming service Thursday night. And the service promptly suffered a major outage across the U.S. and Canada.

As reported by Bloomberg and others, users started to report that the service had crashed at around 10:30 p.m. ET, shortly after Apple made the first two episodes of the show available to stream. There were almost 13,000 reports on Downdetector before Apple acknowledged the problem on its System Status page. Reports say the outage was brief, lasting less than an hour.

At the time of writing, that page has returned to all green. But there remains a Resolved Outage note on Apple TV (simply saying “Some users were affected; users experienced a problem with Apple TV” between 10:29 and 11.38 p.m.), as well as on Apple Music and Apple Arcade, which also went down at the same time. Social media reports indicated that the outage was widespread.

Pluribus is the work of Vince Gilligan, who created Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, and stars Rhea Seehorn from the latter show. It’s one of the highest-profile offerings to appear on Apple TV, so this outage couldn’t have come at a worse time. It isn’t clear what went wrong on a technical level, though it’s possible Apple’s servers simply weren’t ready for the level of demand.