Earlier this month, over 100 cyber security experts, companies and civil society groups signed a letter calling for home secretary Yvette Cooper to drop demands for Apple to create a backdoor into its encrypted iCloud service.

Apple disabled its most secure data storage offering for new customers in the United Kingdom rather than comply with a secret government order.

A backdoor into iCloud end-to-end encryption would defeat the purpose of the feature, so Apple is pulling it from the UK altogether.

The company said it was "gravely disappointed" to no longer be able to offer Advanced Data Protection to iPhone users in the UK.