Apple’s iMessage and FaceTime services suffered prolonged outages overnight, leaving millions of customers unable to use the features.

An update on Apple’s status page confirmed that between 8pm and 1am [PST] the two services were unavailable.

No specific information was provided by Apple beyond a message saying, “Users were unable to place FaceTime/iMessage calls”.

V3 contacted Apple for further comment on the outages but it said it had no additional information to share.

The incident is the latest in a series of recent cloud outages to hit popular services, such as Google’s Drive service that went offline for two hours in March, leaving millions without access to their accounts.

Microsoft’s consumer Outlook service was also hit by problems in a datacentre when it began overheating and so took itself offline to prevent the problem spreading, which caused email access to disappear.

Last week the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) issued a warning to its agent that the security in the iMessage service made it hard for them to eavesdrop on conversations, thereby hindering their efforts, although some security experts dismissed these concerns.

Were you affected by the outage or are still seeing problems today Let us know below.