They were gonna text back. It's just that iMessage went down for almost an hour.

• iMessage, FaceTime, and HomeKit experienced outages for nearly an hour Thursday afternoon.
• The outages, rare for Apple services, affected many users from 2:49 p.m. to 3:35 p.m. PT.

You texted her and she didn't reply. Like, for a whole 30 minutes.

Don't worry. iMessage went down for almost an hour, so it's not you.

It's Apple.

On Thursday afternoon, the tech giant posted on its System Status dashboard that users were "unable to use" iMessage, along with FaceTime and HomeKit.

The outages lasted from 2:49 p.m. to 3:35 p.m. Pacific Time, according to the update from Apple.

"Apple ruining relationships by turning off iMessage," the X user @onlydioria posted during the technical trouble.

It's extremely unusual for iMessage to go down like this. The service has become an integral part of the social fabric of the US, with teens who don't have iPhones agonizing over their green text bubbles not showing up properly in group messages.

Google, the company behind the Android smartphone platform, has been trying to coax Apple into scrapping this stressful form of social stigma. But, you know, blue bubbles sell iPhones, so no dice. Even the Department of Justice zeroed in on the green vs. blue bubble stigma in its antitrust lawsuit against Apple.

This didn't stop some Android phone users from mocking the iMessage outage on Thursday.

"imessage is down. embrace the green bubble," the journalist Philip Lewis wrote on X.

Or, you could just try WhatsApp, which the rest of the world uses easily. That works on both iOS and Android. Incredible. It's like living in the future.

Correction: May 17, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misspelled the first name of one of the people who posted about the iMessage outage. It's Philip Lewis, not Phillip Lewis.