I opened Downdetector this morning and let out a low whistle. There were quite a few complaints about Apple in Russia, the outage graph was orange across nearly its entire width, and the tag cloud prominently displayed the words “not working” and “can’t connect.” People are writing about endless app loading and the inability to update on iPhone without a VPN. And it immediately brought to mind how just recently we speculated whether Apple would be banned in Russia. Back then it seemed like a scare story. But now the App Store is acting up en masse. Is this an ordinary outage or the beginning of a major block?
App Store in Russia is having problems, and this is not a drill
Complaints About App Store in Russia
Here’s the picture on the outage detector. Status — a moderate number of complaints, access issues are coming from more than two dozen cities, and over the past 24 hours the counter has racked up well over a hundred reports. The purple zone on the graph barely drops, and that’s precisely the network outages the system is flagging. In the tag cloud, the leaders are “won’t download,” “won’t load,” “site,” “server.” A classic set for a situation where something has stalled on the access side, not on a specific device.
There are really a lot of complaints
And now my personal test. I took my iPhone 16 Plus, opened the App Store without any VPN, updated a couple of apps, and downloaded a new one at random. Everything opened and installed as usual, with no errors or endless spinners. In other words, for me personally the store is working normally. And that’s the first takeaway: mass complaints and your personal experience may not match at all.
Everything opens for me without VPN
I’ll explain below why this happens.
Why the App Store Doesn’t Work for All Users
The phrase “not working” sounds the same, but behind it are two different stories. And understanding which one is yours is worth doing from the start, because they’re fixed differently.
An outage is a technical failure. Something went down on Apple’s servers or in the network itself, access disappeared on its own and will return on its own. An outage has a telltale sign: it hits everyone at once and doesn’t last long. If it had gone down globally, the App Store wouldn’t load for me, or for you, or for your neighbor, and complaints would be pouring in from dozens of countries, not just Russia. The current picture is different.
A block or throttling is when access to the store is deliberately cut at the network level. It works selectively: one provider has everything flying, while on another apps hang on loading. It won’t resolve itself, and is usually tied to what internet you’re using and whether a foreign IP is enabled. This is exactly the kind of inconsistency we’re seeing on Downdetector, where some people have a total blackout and others have no issues at all.
Here’s the key difference in simple terms. An outage is random, brief, and the same for everyone. A block is targeted, prolonged, and uneven. The current complaints look much more like the latter: there’s a mass effect, but there’s no global crash worldwide.
Apple Restrictions in Russia and Access Problems
Apple refused to preinstall RuStore and removed MAKS and VK from the App Store
Now for the context without which the current complaints are read incorrectly. The atmosphere around Apple in Russia has been heated in recent weeks. At the end of June, the company removed VK apps from the App Store without warning, and before that the MAKS messenger disappeared. On July 1, the FAS (Federal Antimonopoly Service) issued a warning and set a deadline of the fifteenth: install RuStore, restore the removed apps, enable Russian search by default. On July 15, the deadline expired, Apple did nothing, and now it faces a fine of up to four billion rubles.
At the same time, in mid-July the Apple website stopped opening without a VPN, and the Ministry of Digital Development is openly discussing retaliatory measures up to and including restrictions. Against this backdrop, any disruptions with the App Store are immediately read as politics, not as a random technical failure. And users react instantly — hence the spike on Downdetector.
Does this mean the App Store is already being blocked? No, there is no direct confirmation of a block. More likely it’s selective throttling by individual providers plus general anxiety. But the trend is such that ignoring it would be foolish.
What to Do If the App Store Won’t Load
It’s definitely too early to panic. If the store is acting up for you, go through this simple checklist — it covers most cases.
- Check the date and time, set it to automatic mode — this fixes a good half of connection errors.
Switch to automatic time and date format
- Change your DNS to 1.1.1.1 — this helps when your provider is filtering traffic.
