AppleInsider Staff
Apple's iCloud-based iMessage service suffered a short outage on Tuesday that left about 30 percent of users without service for 36 minutes.
According to Apple's System Status webpage, the service outage lasted from 3:35 p.m. to 4:11 p.m. Eastern and affected 30 percent of all iMessage users. That number was changed shortly after, with the notification saying "some" users were affected.
The brief interruption is the latest in a string of troubles for Apple's iCloud, which in June saw back-to-back outages affect 20 percent of users across multiple services, including iTunes Store purchases.
In April, a spate of issues hit iCloud email, GameCenter and iTunes, with Mail seeing downtime of 27 hours.
While Apple offers transparency in reporting when outages occur, the company rarely divulges causes. A contributor could be the massive amount of users attached to the service, which in March accounted for 27 percent of all cloud customers in the U.S., the most out of any service.
To deal with the rapid adoption rate, Apple is building out its cloud server infrastructure with a large datacenter in Reno, Nevada. On Monday, AppleInsider reported that the first structures were going up at the project site, which will ring up some $16 million in construction costs alone.
Andrew Orr
Wesley Hilliard
Malcolm Owen
Christine McKee
William Gallagher
18 Comments
Unacceptable Mr. Cue.
Apple has a lot to learn when it comes to services, they obviously got iTunes working properly but are unable to get other services "right". I really hope they improve quickly on this.
I was one of the 30%!
Oh Noes! Worst case scenario, your message will be sent as a text, or you can use one of the other 56,920 free message apps. "The brief interruption is the latest in a string of troubles for Apple's iCloud.." But well done with the sensationalism. Google services have outages all the time, but with Apple it's always "a string of troubles" whenever there's a minor glitch.
Wow. 36 minutes! Oh the horror! Sensationalist whiners.
Sure, it would be nice if it were working 99.999% of the time, but come off it. Considering the hundreds of millions of text messages that it does send per hour over how long between outages, I have better things to do. If iMessage goes down, it comes across as a text message. Big deal.
Btw, how's that huge Android flaw affecting 99% of users doing? Don't hear much about that!
Unacceptable Mr. Cue.
Apple has a lot to learn when it comes to services, they obviously got iTunes working properly but are unable to get other services "right". I really hope they improve quickly on this.
It funny how Google has multiple longer lasting outages every year affecting far more people and if thats all they use they don't even have access to the ones the already received. This saga continues. I think one of the reason you don't hear about it is Google Advertises and also provides ad income to these information outlets. They also control what shows up in searches so they can suppress anything not flattering. You have to be very specific to find anything bad about android or google when searching. For instance. Search for Android and you get nothing but positive articles including one that mentions a fix for the Giant security hole in Android being sent to Carriers. What is odd is that there was no mention of this problem until last week. It's been in the wild and they were informed in February. Even this article was done to make them look like heroes. The first critical article was on page 6. Do the same for iPhone and outside of links to people who sell iPhones other articles tend to be negative. Even though the Apple sites have been fairly positive lately. Odd huh?