Several of Apple’s services have been down since early Wednesday morning. Apple’s status page indicates that, since about 5:00 a.m. Eastern time, the App Store, iTunes Store, iBooks Store and Mac App Store have been experiencing a major outage. Likewise, iCloud Mail and iCloud Account & Sign in were down for a few hours, but returned at about 8:30 a.m. Eastern. Apple is apologizing to its users.

“We apologize to our customers experiencing problems with iTunes and other services this morning,” a spokesperson told CNBC this afternoon. “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.” Apple’s status page still says that the App Store, Mac App Store, iTunes Store and iBooks Store are “may be unavailable for all users,” but it sounds like all should be up shortly.

It appears that the outages may have even affected sales in Apple Store locations in the United Kingdom. CNBC said some stores there were unable to process payments using digital systems that use Apple’s store applications. The stores instead had to use paper payment methods, the news outlet said. How uncivilized.

SOURCE CNBC