iCloud Drive Total Meltdown....Help?!

[fronesis]

EDIT, in case anyone finds this thread in a search: it seems like the problem was definitely on Apple's end, and after a few days they were able to fix it. I went two days with no access to iCloud drive, and then two more with sporadic and unreliable access. At this point it's now been 5 days since iCloud drive can back online for me fully, and (*knock on wood*) it now seems fine.

My advice to others who encounter the problems described below:
1) if you can't access icloud drive through icloud.com (and you get error messages to that effect), then your only real options are A) to wait, or B) to call apple. There's nothing you can do on your end to fix it.

2) If possible, do not turn off iCloud drive on your Mac. This will move all your files to an "iCloud Drive (archive)" folder, and when the system comes back online you'll have to re-download everything. In my experience, turning off iCloud drive did not help fix anything. I will note, however, that turning of iCloud drive on my iPad was required if I wanted to use Pages or Numbers on the iPad (none of the iCloud drive documents were accessible).

----ORIGINAL POST and thread below–––––

I'm a long (long) longtime Mac user and heavy iCloud drive user. I have hundreds of PDF files and Pages files that I work on every day on both my iPad (Pro 12.9) and my Mac (2014 Mini). It's been working great for a very long time.

This morning iCloud drive was not uploading any files I modified on my Mac. I started troubleshooting and realized nothing was going up or down to the cloud. My internet connection was fine. Then, when going to iCloud.com, logging in, and choosing iCloud dirve, I get a message that says "Can't load iCloud Drive." If I go to Pages on icloud.com I can see my documents, but trying to open one gives the error "Sorry, something went wrong."

I turned iCloud Drive off and then back on on my iPad, but now that just means that the iCloud drive app is blank (there should be thosuands of fiesl – about 70GB of data – there), and if I lanch Pages on the iPad it just spins looking for documents.

I took the very rare step of calling apple, spending the needed 40 minutes to get escalated to a supervisor. They gathered a bunch of data from my Mac, which seems like a waste to me since the error is clearly on the server side. I can log into a brand new Mac and go to icloud.com and it says "Can't load iCloud drive" and my iPad can't see any of my icloud drive data, so it has nothing to do with my Mac.

I'm completely backed up, but not sure what step to take next. At the moment, I can't use my iPad at all (no access to any documents). I'm *heavily* dependent on iCloud drive because my primary work flow is working on dozens of PDFs in PDF Expert and dozens of Pages documents in Pages, and I move back and forth between my Mac and iPad all the time.

ANY THOUGHTS?

For the record: the Mini is running the newest version of MacOS Sierra, and the iPad is running iOS 10.2.1. The Mini has 120GB free on its SSD, and the iPad has 10GB of storage free. I run basically NO third party software other than – 1Password, Dropbox, MS Word.

My home network is working fine, with 25MB upload and low latency. My wife is running a Mac and an iPad in the same house, and her iCloud drive is working fine.

Yesterday afternoon this was working OK for me; the problem began this morning when I noticed while on my Mac that none of the documents I'd created/updated this morning were uploading to iCloud drive.

UPDATE: I just went to icloud.com and just tried to download one of my Pages documents; it gave me the error "due to account maintenance, Pages is locked." Some message in Numbers. Not sure if this means they are actually working on it, or it's just the error message it's spitting out.

 

[QzzB]

I believe there has been some problems with iCloud in the last few days. It all seems to be up and running again now but has been some outages reported on the Apple Support Status Site:

https://www.apple.com/my/support/systemstatus/

Might of been the cause. Generally always good to check Service status if something isn't behaving correctly, and giving it a few hours or so. Things are always not 100% instant and often a problem with services outside of your network.
[doublepost=1488407587][/doublepost]I checked and there was this note:

iCloud Drive - 2 Resolved Issues

02/27/2017, 10:20 AM - 11:24 AM

Less than 1% of users were affected

New and recently changed content may not have updated across devices or at iCloud.com.

Yesterday, 5:39 PM - 9:35 PM

Less than 1% of users were affected

Users may have experienced slower than normal performance with this service.


Time is UK as I'm in London

 

[fronesis]

I believe there has been some problems with iCloud in the last few days. It all seems to be up and running again now but has been some outages reported on the Apple Support Status Site:

https://www.apple.com/my/support/systemstatus/

Might of been the cause. Generally always good to check Service status if something isn't behaving correctly, and giving it a few hours or so. Things are always not 100% instant and often a problem with services outside of your network.
[doublepost=1488407587][/doublepost]I checked and there was this note:

iCloud Drive - 2 Resolved Issues

02/27/2017, 10:20 AM - 11:24 AM

Less than 1% of users were affected

New and recently changed content may not have updated across devices or at iCloud.com.

Yesterday, 5:39 PM - 9:35 PM

Less than 1% of users were affected

Users may have experienced slower than normal performance with this service.


Time is UK as I'm in London

Yes, absolutely – I'm aware of all those problems. But I don't expect the issue I have now to resolve itself on its own and Apple currently says that everything is fine.

And my current problem isn't just a failure of iCloud to sync. I can't access iCloud Drive at all so I can't use Pages, etc.

 

[QzzB]

If iCloud.com still isn't working, why not raise with Apple? They should look at it. https://getsupport.apple.com can do a online chat and they might be able to check the system

 

[fronesis]

If iCloud.com still isn't working, why not raise with Apple? They should look at it. https://getsupport.apple.com can do a online chat and they might be able to check the system

Thanks – but that's in my initial post I talked with Apple on the phone for two hours today.

 

[Planey28]

Any updates? I'm experiencing the same issue; additionally iCloud Photo Library refuses to work.

 

[fronesis]

Any updates? I'm experiencing the same issue; additionally iCloud Photo Library refuses to work.

No change in the status of my iCloud Drive – still completely non-functional. It looks to me as if my entire cloud is fully corrupted; it cannot be accessed in any way at all.

The Apple senior support person has said that "Engineering" now has all my information, and it's a priority, but I've seen nothing at all change on my end – not even any sign that they've tried everything.

It's clear they need to reset my iCloud Drive, and there used to be an option for this on icloud.com, but it's been replaced with the option to retrieve old deleted files – that, like everything else is inaccessible for me.

I'll check my icloud photo library now.

 

[Shing]

I am having the same issues as described above. I also spoke with Apple and my information was provided to "Engineering." If you're having the same problem I suggest you call Apple as well and get a case number.

 

[imaswitcheryeah]

I have this issue as well, contacted Apple Support yesterday and talked on the phone while an engineer shared my screen. I'm not able to make new documents in iCloud.com, and documents that I edit on the desktop with Collaboration turned on are showing an error and I can't edit the document without making a copy that does not have Collaboration turned on. Still having the same issues today, and the Apple System Status page is saying everything is running "normally".

 

[Planey28]

A couple of others on twitter are reporting the same. I'll call Apple when I get back from work and report back.

iCloud backup is also not working for me. In total, drive, photos, backup and iWork are all broken. The restore files feature on iCloud.com is broken too.

 

[fronesis]

I'm sorry others are having problems, but I confess that I'm a bit heartened the situation is a bit more widespread - maybe Apple will actual apply some resources to fixing it.

Apple has intentionally put icloud drive at the core of functionality on the ipad, and therefore also on the Mac (if you want to move easily back and forth), so with my entire iCloud Drive corrupted on the server side, I basically have only partially functioning apple hardware.
[doublepost=1488473493][/doublepost]

I have this issue as well, contacted Apple Support yesterday and talked on the phone while an engineer shared my screen. I'm not able to make new documents in iCloud.com, and documents that I edit on the desktop with Collaboration turned on are showing an error and I can't edit the document without making a copy that does not have Collaboration turned on. Still having the same issues today, and the Apple System Status page is saying everything is running "normally".

Not that we can do much with this info, but I'm pretty sure my problems began in relation to a document I tried to share through iCloud collaboration – this was on Tuesday afternoon when Apple had widespread problems. My hunch is that somehow the file with collaboration turned on got caught in some sort of sync loop or otherwise corrupted iCloud drive on the cloud side for me.

 

[Shing]

A couple of others on twitter are reporting the same. I'll call Apple when I get back from work and report back.

iCloud backup is also not working for me. In total, drive, photos, backup and iWork are all broken. The restore files feature on iCloud.com is broken too.

In addition to the services you mentioned, Notes does not work for me either.

 

[Planey28]

I've just got off the phone with support, the issue has been escalated to engineers for me as well. I've also been asked to send screenshots of every error message which will be sent to the engineers.

The rep on the phone mentioned the storage use and the reserved storage for each category (photos, docs etc) do not match up correctly on my account so it sounds like some kind of server-side corruption has occurred (speculation of course). I will report back when I hear back from Apple.

 

[Shing]

It looks like the issue may be fixed. All of my icloud.com services are back online. Will check my iOS and macOS devices when I get home.

UPDATE: Looks like my iOS and macOS devices are working as well.

 

[Planey28]

Still not fixed for me at all, but glad it's working for you. Hopefully in the morning my account will be back to normal, we shall see.

 

[fronesis]

Still not fixed for me. But happy to hear someone has seen progress.

 

[fronesis]

Late last night I was finally able to access iCloud Drive on iCloud.com. I then turned iCloud Drive back on on my Mac. It started downloading all of my files, but it has a long way to go. My Documents folder has about 60GB of data in it, and so far it's only downloaded 3GB.

Fingers crossed...

UPDATE: it's been about 8 hours and it's not looking good. iCloud Drive downloaded about 3GB of data, and then for no reason I could discern it decided (this is on my mac) that it had 4 items it needed to upload. It's been stuck with "4 items to upload" for at least 2 hours. Restarting the finder or restarting the mac only puts me right back in stuck.

If I go to Pages on my iPad it shows me all my icloud pages document, but if I touch one to open it, the status changes to "updating" at the top, and then just sits there.

So something was reset, and I can now see my documents on icloud.com, but both my Mac and iPad are still non-functional with iCloud Drive.

After a couple of more hours with "stuck uploading," I can now no longer access iCloud Drive at iCloud.com – it tries to load but just spins and spins. My guess is that they gave me access again, but whatever file was causing the corruption or conflict is still around.

This just isn't viable. The deep integration of iCloud Drive makes it my first choice, but I think I have to seek other options.

 

[Planey28]

iCloud was working fine for me until this afternoon. Now the same problems are occurring, and my data has completely disappeared. Really not happy at all :/

 

[fronesis]

Maybe iCloud has a problem dealing with user's named "Sam" (that's my name too).

My situation is right back to where it was yesterday: can't access iCloud Drive at all – totally non-functional.

 

[imaswitcheryeah]

I'm still in the same boat as well, can't use iWork apps at iCloud.com. After seeing all the other issues you guys were having, I checked and I'm having those issues as well:

• iCloud Backup of iPhone 7+ is showing 0 KB. However, it does say my last backup was at 1:37pm on 2/28 (which was around the downtime event). I'm locally/manually backing up to iTunes now.
• Restore Files and Restore Bookmarks on iCloud.com Advanced Settings are both not loading because of an error.
• iCloud Photos syncing is no longer working and I can't access Photos on iCloud.com
• iCloud Drive on iCloud.com will not open and files will not sync up to iCloud
• Notes on iCloud.com will not open and notes are not syncing between devices

I want to call Apple Support to find out/report back more, but it's Friday night and I have a life to live, so I'll report back when I finally decide to call them. Also my name is Dan so you can rule out this being related to people named "Sam".

 

[fronesis]

Also my name is Dan so you can rule out this being related to people named "Sam".

See, now we're making progress!

 

[fronesis]

Update from me: whatever Apple does to try to fix these issues, they seem to do it around midnight US EST. Last night about that time I again got access to iCloud drive on icloud.com, and everything was visible.

I first turned on iCloud Drive on my iPad, not my mac, and waited for it to be able to access all documents through apps. That seemed to work.

I then turned on iCloud Drive on my Mac and went to bed. This morning it's showing signs of life, having downloaded most of my files overnight – seemingly without error (**fingers crossed**). I'm waiting for it to finish downloading before I do any work with iCloud Drive files. And I have yet to tick back on "Documents and Desktop" but I don't think that will matter much because those files are all being downloaded anyway since they are on iCloud drive.

EDIT: NOPE, back down. After working fine all day, at 10:00pm tonight I copied a few files to iCloud Drive (just 3 files totaling 7MB) and they got stuck on uploading. I then went to iCloud.com and upon logging in and trying to access iCloud Drive I got an error message. It's as if the cloud corrupted itself, or apple did something on their end to break it. It was fine all day and I wasn't even using my computer.

 

[Sartre]

My iCloud Drive seems to be corrupted as well. None of my devices are syncing, backup won't work, icloud.com keeps spitting out errors when trying to access Notes, etc. I logged in using a different account and it works perfectly, so it's obviously a server-side issue with my account.