Apple’s iCloud Private Relay, a feature designed to safeguard paying subscribers’ online activities by masking their IP addresses and blocking trackers, has experienced widespread outages across major markets, restricting users’ access to internet services and applications reliant on web connectivity?
TechCrunch has learned that iCloud Private Relay’s outage has impacted some Apple users in regions including Europe, India, Japan, and the United States since at least Thursday. Sporadic outages are impeding customer access to online services via Safari browser and preventing accurate reporting of web connectivity issues through mobile app interfaces.
Apple’s system status webpage reports on the latest iCloud Private Relay outage, noting that the service may be “slow or unavailable” for some users.
In 2021, iCloud+ subscribers specifically benefited from the introduction of iCloud Private Relay, a feature designed to safeguard Apple users from online tracking by encrypting traffic traversing their devices. The DNS service employs a dual-web-relay architecture to thwart online tracking and minimize the ability of network trackers and web service providers to build comprehensive profiles of users by correlating their IP addresses, location data, and search patterns. Utilizing the innovative technology jointly developed by Apple and Cloudflare in 2020.
In case you are affected by the continued iCloud Non-public Relay outage, you possibly can quickly swap off the service by going to Settings > Profile > iCloud > Non-public Relay.
Apple declined to comment on our request.
