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iTunes Store suffering outages, delays

It's not clear what is causing slow load times and errors on Apple's iTunes Store, but customers are starting to get frustrated.

Tom Krazit Former Staff writer, CNET News
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Google, as the most prominent company on the Internet defends its search juggernaut while expanding into nearly anything it thinks possible. He has previously written about Apple, the traditional PC industry, and chip companies. E-mail Tom.
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Tom Krazit
It's been a tough morning for the iTunes Store, which seems to be experiencing technical difficulties. Josh Lowensohn/CNET

The wait to access the iTunes Store on Thursday morning is starting to resemble the wait for Guns N' Roses' new album.

If you had designs on purchasing the long-delayed album Chinese Democracy Thursday from Apple, you were in for a long wait. iTunes customers reported long delays when trying to access the store, which appeared to be up but suffering in some way. The problems appeared to affect all parts of the store, including the App Store, and range from pages timing out, to odd pages such as the one above cropping up during searches, to just plain old slowness.

It's not clear what is causing the problems, and an Apple representative did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment. Let us know if you have problems accessing the store, or if you lost any purchases or application downloads while shopping Thursday morning.

UPDATED 12:35pm - Things seem to be back to normal, pages are loading quickly within the iTunes Store. Apple has yet to comment on what might have happened.