With Apple's iMessage and FaceTime witnessing service disruptions on Sunday, a number of iPhone, iPad, and Macbook users took the Twitter route to voice their grouse at the inability to chat with their friends.

According to reports, Apple's iMessage instant messaging service and its FaceTime video-calling app suffered from a nearly five-hour outage from 11:45 a. m. to 4:32 p. m. PT (2:45 to 7:45 p. m. ET); with the downtime affecting an unknown number of users of the iOS devices as well as Mac systems running OS X 10.6.6 or higher.

In an official conformation of the service outage, Apple said - at about 1:30 p. m. PT (4:30 p. m. ET) - on its iCloud System Status webpage that some "users are unable to use" use iMessage or place FaceTime calls. While Apple also added that the text-messaging service "will be restored ASAP," the company refrained from giving an exact time in that post on the status page.

However, later in its 16:41 p. m. PST status update, Apple said that the issues bothering iMessage and FaceTime users had been fixed; and confirmed that both the services had been restored.

Meanwhile, going by an AppleInsider report, during the "past three months," iMessage has witnessed as many as four service outages, including the most recent one. The previous service disruptions included a series of service outages in mid-September; followed by iMessage availability for three hours in late October, and another outage on October 30.