AppleInsider Staff
Users are reporting that iMessage and FaceTime are experiencing outages across the U.S., the second time in a week that services attached to Apple's iCloud are seeing issues.
Update: All services have been restored as of 4:41 PST.
A number of AppleInsider readers reported on Sunday that they could not send or receive iMessages from their iPhones and iPads, a problem that is becoming more common since the company's newest iOS 6 was released in September.
According to Apple's iCloud system status webpage, "some" users unable to use iMessage or place FaceTime calls, with the error coming less than two days after an issue appeared with iCloud storage upgrade payment transactions. Apple said service will return to normal "ASAP."
Sunday's downtime marks the fourth such outage in the past three months, with one incident in September and two in October (1, 2) affecting users of iMessage on both iOS and OS X clients. At the time, messages sent through Apple's proprietary service were pushed through as SMS texts.
While iMessage and FaceTime appear to be the most prone to errors, iCloud's email service has also seen problems, the latest being a September outage that affected 1.1 percent of all users.
Introduced alongside iOS 5, iMessage is Apple's smartphone-integrated answer to online messaging services like AOL Instant Messenger and Google Chat. The service is data based, allowing iOS device users to communicate with each other and Macs running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, without racking up text fees.
Andrew Orr
Amber Neely
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Christine McKee
85 Comments
These outages with iMessage and Facetime are almost routine now. I remember when people were bashing RIM when they suffered a rash of BBM outages; people were touting iPhones as an alternative. Hmm, I realize it's a bit of Apples to Oranges but Apple can't run a cloud service to save it's life.
iCloud is still too problematic. When is Apple finally going to sort out these recurring bugs?
iCloud is still too problematic. When is Apple finally going to sort out these recurring bugs?
iCloud is amazing.
The problem is that Apple (and everything related to them..) is growing too quickly. 5 years ago they sold 4 million macs per year. Now they sell per quarter:
-30 million iPhones, 15 million iPads, 15 million iPods, 5 million macs, 2 OSes, lot's of software, lot's of Apps/music/movies and services, more hardware. iCloud just suffers with this sort of growing and demand.
Be patient and please behave with common-sense.
I think PhotoStream is also being affected. I took a picture on my iPhone, it's showing up on the Photostream on the phone, but isn't showing up on my Macbook Air's Photostream.
So is iMessage failing back to SMS on phones? Does that work even when you also/mainly use an ipad / mac? And can you still phone people without FaceTime?