Consumers around the world who tried to buy music and media from iTunes and Apple’s app stores were met with error messages Wednesday. Apple confirmed that the App store, iTunes store, Mac App store and iBook store, were down for users worldwide.

"Customers may be unable to make purchases from the App Store, iTunes Store, iBooks Store, or Mac App Store," the company said.

The iCloud Mail and iCloud Account & Sign In were affected until about 9 a.m. ET., but had been restored.

iTunes and App Store finally went back online on Wednesday afternoon after an rare 12-hour outage. The company attributed the outage to an internal Domain Name System error.

Information about the status of Apple's services is available online here.