Q: Since upgrading to Mavericks, I’ve been having problems logging into the iTunes Store on my new MacBook. I was logged in without any problems at first, but after I switched to the U.S. store to look for an app, I couldn’t log back into the U.K. store any more.
All it ever says is that the iTunes Store is not available, yet I can log in fine from my iPad and iPhone. Any ideas? I’ve tried restarting iTunes and restarting my computer, but it’s been saying this for three days now.
– Justin
A: While there are a number of reasons this can occur, the most common one that we’ve encountered recently is actually related to corrupt data in a place that would seem to be unrelated: your Safari browser.
The issue is that the iTunes Store essentially works through the same WebKit browser libraries as Safari, and therefore a lot of the data such as cookies and cache are actually shared between the two.
If you take a trip into your Safari preferences, you can find a section for Cookies and other website data on the Privacy tab.
Clicking on the Details button from here will open up a list of sites that have stored data on your computer. Typing “apple.com” in the search box at the top-right corner will help you easily find data stored for Apple’s sites, including iTunes Store related cookies and data.
Selecting the entry for “apple.com” and clicking the “Remove” button will clear out this data.
