If you’re like us, the first thing you do every morning is check the weather app on your iPhone. If it returned a blank screen this morning, it’s not a problem with your Wi-Fi – Apple systems have serious problems.
According to Apple’s system status page, the Weather app has had “persistent” problems since 11:00 pm ET Monday, and the service “may be slow or unreliable.” Apple notes that “some users are affected”, but based on anecdotal proof– including Macworld’s own experience – the problem seems to be fairly common. This also affects the Weather widget which reports “No weather data available” even though the weather is correctly displayed in the app. The status page also explicitly states that rainfall data for the next hour may not be available for Alaska due to an outage in the data provider.
Apple responded to requests on Twitter with a message that they are “currently working on a fix for the Weather app crashing issue and will post an update online.”
Some Macworld employees have experienced intermittent issues with the Weather app over the past few weeks. Sometimes the app loads slowly or doesn’t load at all. Exiting the app and restarting it was a quick fix, but even that doesn’t always work. So we’re on standby until Apple gives us a green light (literally, yellow on Apple’s status page at the moment). Some reports suggest that an iOS 16.4.1 update may be imminent to fix this issue, but it could take a few days.
Of course, it’s not the end of the world, as there are plenty of ways to get weather information and forecasts on your phone. However, after Apple shut down the popular Dark Sky app on January 1, the default iOS Weather app that implemented many of Dark Sky’s features has likely become a source of weather information for many other users.
We will update this story as we receive more information about the issue.