Some regions temporarily barred from selling apps

iTunes Connect is officially scheduled to undergo maintenance today between 9AM and 4PM Pacific time, developers reveal. The service represents the backend of iTunes, the means by which people submit audio, video and applications. Apple is cautioning app developers to avoid making pricing changes during the downtime, since that will cause an app to disappear from sale until the maintenance is over. At that point an app should return with its new pricetag.

In some regions, apps will be totally unavailable during the maintenance. Countries affected in this regard include Australia, Mexico, Norway, Japan, Switzerland and the UK. There have been some accounts of difficulty getting into the Mac App Store, but these appear to have been solved.

The work on iTunes Connect is thought to be related to OS X Lion. The OS is expected to launch through the Mac App Store as soon as tomorrow, and Apple will likely need infrastructure operating at peak capacity to cope with the burden of thousands of simultaneous downloads, each measuring in the gigabytes.

by MacNN Staff