As of June 12, 2012 , Apple’s App Store contained more than 650,000 iOS applications, which have collectively been downloaded more than 30 billion times.

When attempting to download apps, iOS users are met with a Cannot connect to iTunes Store notification, with iTunes displaying a iTunes Store is temporarily available error.

For starters, 43% of iOS apps didn’t encrypt people’s personal data when it was being transmitted.

Alexey Borodin, the programmer responsible for the iOS App Store hack earlier this month has managed to repeat his success on Apples Mac App Store.

This appears to rule out some theories that app servers are unresponsive due to Apples impending launch of its new Mountain Lion Mac operating system.

However, Apple has been working to negate a recent flaw in its in app purchasing mechanism, yesterday launching a new private API that outlines methods for preventing the exploit that allowed free transactions.

The company shared a procedure that is not included in its current framework for developers, suggesting it is giving developers access to parts of the API that they would not normally have access to in order to implement a fix immediately, before rolling it out iOS 6.

At the moment, we cant confirm whether Apple is performing maintenance on the App Store (which could include the implementation of server side app receipt checks) or that the service is down for reasons unknown.

As of June 30, however, Apple dropped Clueful from its App Store, although anyone who had already bought the app can continue to use it.

So far, there are confirmed App Store outages in the US, UK, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Indonesia and Kuwait.

While Clueful remains off the App Store, we are working toward building data privacy awareness and will continue to develop products that help consumers remain secure regardless of platform.

Sean Brierley is a business journalist based in Hobart, Australia. Sean has a passion for financial markets and breaking news stories and loves writing about business news, stock market, and economic opinions that matters most to its audience. Sean spends a lot of time discovering and researching latest financial markets and industry news stories in order to make sure the latest and greatest stories are brought to you first on BigBoardNews.com.