Apple's iTunes, app stores back online after 12-hour outage

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc's iTunes and App Store came back online on Wednesday afternoon, according to its online status page, after an unusual hours-long disruption that the company blamed on an internal technical error.

The outage began a little before 5:00 am ET, after which users vented their frustrations on Twitter about being unable to access the popular mobile apps store and online content service. Apple updated its status page at 5:04 pm ET to show that the disrupted services, including the Mac App Store and iBooks, were now functioning normally.

(Reporting by Edwin Chan; Editing by Christian Plumb)