ITunes, Apple’s App Store, iBooks, and Mac App Stores were all down on Wednesday, while other Apple services like FaceTime, iCloud, and Apple TV were functioning correctly.

The Next Web (TNW) first found the issue in america and UK App Stores and turned to readers to help figure out how prevalent the problem was. The site found that everyone from Armenia to Hong Kong was blocked from purchasing content during the many online stores.

As of press time, the issue hasn’t yet been worked out, starting Twitter hashtags such as #appstoredown and #itunesdown.

Apple issued an apology and a statement to CNBC, describing that the outage was caused by an internal error.

“The cause was an internal DNS malfunction at Apple.

So what’s an internal DNS error anyhow?

Well, first off, “internal” means the malfunction happened within Apple’s own corporate network. It operates by enabling users to type straightforward names – such as csmonitor.com – into an address bar, rather than typing out the entire IP address for every site and server.

The entire procedure operates by the DNS interpreting a domain name (csmonitor.com) into an IP address, which means that your computer will link to the right website.

DNS errors can happen because there is a problem with the DNS routing to correct domain name or when there is a dysfunction in this system because a server is down.

Take a look at Apple’s system status web site in the event you would like to be aware of the minute that iTunes is up and running again.