Tech giant Apple’s online services were hit by a major outage on Thursday, because of which users could not access the company’s iTunes and app stores.

The Apple online services which suffered a crash on Thursday included the App Store, Apple TV App Store, Mac App Store, iTunes in the Cloud, and the Volume Purchase Program, among others. All these services remained unavailable for many users for a few hours.

Reports of the outage of Apple’s online services first started coming in at 3:30 p.m., when several users started complaining in Twitter posts that they were not able to access the music they have stored on Apple’s iTunes Music service.

Some users said in their tweets that a pop-up message, reading “The iTunes Store is unable to process purchases at this time,” showed up when they tried to purchase an item through the iTunes storefront; while others said that they were receiving a message which said: "Unable to connect to iTunes purchases."

Acknowledging the outage of its online services, Apple said in a late Thursday statement on its website that the most of the services which suffered a crash were restored by 6:15 p.m. However, iCloud and Apple TV still remained inaccessible by affected users.