If you’re like us, one of the first things you do each day is to check the weather app on your iPhone. If it returned a blank screen this morning—or yesterday morning or the morning before that—it’s not an issue with your Wi-Fi—Apple’s systems have been having serious problems this week.
According to Apple’s System Status page on Thursday, the Weather app had “ongoing” issues with “slow or unreliable” service since 11:27 am ET Thursday following several issues earlier in the week. On Wednesday night, there were also issues with iMessage and iCloud, as noted by numerous complaints on Twitter. As of Friday morning, the service was working, but it seems to be a matter of time before it breaks again.
After more than half a day of intermittent outages, the service was restored on Tuesday, though on Wednesday morning the issue returned. Apple’s status page says the app was fixed as of Tuesday afternoon and then again Wednesday morning, but on Thursday it went down again. Clearly, the Weather app itself needs a larger fix, which likely won’t come until next week at the earliest.
Apple notes that “some users are affected,” but based on anecdotal evidence—including Macworld’s own experience—the issue appeared to be quite widespread. It also appears to affect the Weather widget, which continues to display “No weather data” even when the weather is properly loaded in the app. We also experienced outages on Wednesday morning even after Apple claimed the issue was fixed, and again on Thursday. We had better luck with the Weather app in macOS Ventura, but at least one Macworld reader said they experienced the same issues on the Mac.
Apple responded to queries on Twitter with a message saying they are “currently working on a solution for the Weather app outage and will post an update online.” Later in the afternoon, Apple’s status page was all green and the warning indicator had been lifted, though it quickly cropped up again.
Some Macworld staffers have experienced on-and-off issues with the Weather app over the past several weeks. At times, the app is slow to load or doesn’t load at all. Quitting the app and relaunching has been a quick workaround, but even that doesn’t always work. So while Apple has given us the green light (literally, it’s no longer yellow on Apple’s status page) it’s not clear if there isn’t a need for a larger fix to the app. Some reports suggested that an iOS 16.4.1 update could be imminent to fix the underlying issue. Apple doesn’t update its apps independently from the system, so any fix will need to arrive as part of a larger iOS update.
Of course, it’s not the end of the world since there are numerous ways to get weather conditions and forecasts on your phone. However, after Apple shuttered the popular Dark Sky app on January 1, the stock iOS Weather app—which picked up many of the Dark Sky features in iOS 16—is likely the go-to source for weather information for many more users.
Author: Michael Simon, Executive Editor
Michael Simon has been covering Apple since the iPod was the iWalk. His obsession with technology goes back to his first PC—the IBM Thinkpad with the lift-up keyboard for swapping out the drive. He's still waiting for that to come back in style tbh.