Some Users Not Able to Access iCloud Mail or Website [Update: Back Up]

Castiel said:

Had problems, everything working great now.
I'm more worried though, about the fact my account picture is definitely not of me and just some random guy.

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You may have been face hacked! Quickly grab a recent photo of yourself, & check it with the face you see in the mirror. If they do not match, you will have to do a roll back, either with Time Machine or a plastic Surgeon!!





(Not to be confused with a Plastic Sturgeon, which is a fake Fishing Trophy some people mount on their walls to impress visitors with their outdoor sports finesse,)

Well, I did pay for it (MobileMe), and the me.com e-mail address is the one I have communicated to my business partners, as it's the one I'm receiving push emails on, supposed to reach me spam-free and immediately on all my mobile devices as well as on my workstation.

Recently though, it has become the most unreliable one and I am not amused by that.
For me, it's unreachable for the second time this month right now which means I do not receive potentially important e-mails at the moment.
Not really acceptable.

as anyone who's ever worked in a data centre will attest, every IT system will have outages from time to time. For that matter, my power just went out for 1.5hrs and yes it's mildly annoying when you're cooking or in the middle of watching a show.

the threshold for complaining seems to be generally coming down, our ADD, instant-gratification culture demands it.

as a 25 year veteran in IT, I can tell you, that any production system I've ever worked on has had outages. Some planned, some unplanned.

frequency and duration of outages is what determines QoS. I think Apple is generally not doing too badly considering the newness of the NC data centre and the number of users it serves. I think their SLA on uptime is probably close to 99.99%, but it would be nice to have a public status page that would show statistics.

personally I keep 3 mainstream email services thru different services: me.com, gmail, godaddy own domain.

I've never had all 3 lights out! Then there's SMS and the (i)Phone that really important messages can reach me in an instant.

Solowalker said:

One last morsel of food for though: it's FREE. Don't complain too much. You can grumble a bit but you can't threaten to sue over a free service.

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cvaldes said:

The price is zero.

It's a free service.

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Nothing is free. You weren't charged separately for it, but it wasn't free.

Tozzi said:

Well, I did pay for it (MobileMe), and the me.com e-mail address is the one I have communicated to my business partners, as it's the one I'm receiving push emails on, supposed to reach me spam-free and immediately on all my mobile devices as well as on my workstation.

Recently though, it has become the most unreliable one and I am not amused by that.
For me, it's unreachable for the second time this month right now which means I do not receive potentially important e-mails at the moment.
Not really acceptable.

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Exactly the same use and situation for me. And I "upgraded" from Mobile Me to iCloud because I was beginning to have problems with the mobile me service failing more and more regularly for a few minutes every day or so. I put that down to the transition and thought iCloud would be more stable. I really hope they can move past these teething problems, as otherwise I love the way it works for me.

Funny how people say "don't complain, it's for free" about this service; firstly in both our cases until June 2012 it is not free, and secondly if a service is touted as top of the line, it should be just that.

its working now, hadn't checked it earlier, however iCloud isn't working with my Outlook 2007

I updated my iPhone 4, iPad Orig. & iPad 2 to iOS 5 (and 5.0.1) as soon as possible and created my free iCloud account. But I am still using it only for "Find my iPhone" service and didn't activate the other services yet.

The only thing I ever synced in something like a cloud (other than mail) was/is my calendar. It's running fine since almost three years (since my iPhone 3G) via CalDAV, Exchange and Google Mobile Sync. Works seamless and fully automatic with Mac Calendar App, iOS Calendar App and Google Web Calendar. Google even sends a (free) text message (SMS) when an appointment approaches (iCloud?). The only black hours were after the launch of iOS 4 if I remember correctly. Other than that very reliable.

Although I would love to give up Google: Never change a running system. I'll wait with the iCloud until there are three months without blackout. I have absolutely to RELY on my online calendar.

manu chao said:

Anybody also having the issue that no iWork documents created on the Mac (on 10.7.2 with Keynote 5.1, Pages 4.1, Numbers 2.1) show up in iCloud? If I import them 'into iCloud' via Dropbox and the iOS iWork apps they do show up. Do I have to do something special with iWork documents created on the Mac for them to show up in iCloud?

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As far as I know, iWork on the Mac doesn't automatically upload documents to the cloud. You have to sign into iCloud.com, and drag and drop onto the web interface, then it will become iCloud-available.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

macpeach55 said:

Castiel said:

Had problems, everything working great now.
I'm more worried though, about the fact my account picture is definitely not of me and just some random guy.

Click to expand...

You may have been face hacked! Quickly grab a recent photo of yourself, & check it with the face you see in the mirror. If they do not match, you will have to do a roll back, either with Time Machine or a plastic Surgeon!!





(Not to be confused with a Plastic Sturgeon, which is a fake Fishing Trophy some people mount on their walls to impress visitors with their outdoor sports finesse,)

Click to expand...

Best. Post. Ever. Macpeach55, you are my hero. (not really. But I WILL watch for your future posts with heightened expectations.)

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

macpeach55 said:

Castiel said:

Had problems, everything working great now.
I'm more worried though, about the fact my account picture is definitely not of me and just some random guy.

Click to expand...

You may have been face hacked! Quickly grab a recent photo of yourself, & check it with the face you see in the mirror. If they do not match, you will have to do a roll back, either with Time Machine or a plastic Surgeon!!





(Not to be confused with a Plastic Sturgeon, which is a fake Fishing Trophy some people mount on their walls to impress visitors with their outdoor sports finesse,)

Click to expand...

Best. Post. Ever. Macpeach55, you are my hero. (not really. But I WILL watch for your future posts with heightened expectations.)

Apple, don't make me go back to Gmail. I hate the ads and the overall stale interface. iCloud is waaaaay cooler.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Apple is a mainstream consumer company now. This means people like my wife who know little to nothing about technology bought her iPhone because she was sold on the ease of use and the "it just works" philosophy. Outages like this don't compute for her type. They just think they've bought a phone that doesn't work and is quick to dump it to try something else (they don't know nothing else out there is really that much better, if at all). It won't matter, if Apple keeps up this "beta" type of service, many new customers who haven't locked themselves into Apple's Eco-system yet, might jump. They really need to put quality first again.

R u serious?

If you want 99.999999% availability - go find a service provider the provides business-level SLAs that guarantees this in writing - they are out there... hope your "business" can support the cost of such a mission critical service - but for some reason I doubt it.

Still Down!

Grrrr

Really???

zaxdad said:

If you want 99.999999% availability - go find a service provider the provides business-level SLAs that guarantees this in writing - they are out there... hope your "business" can support the cost of such a mission critical service - but for some reason I doubt.

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I think if people want to express their issue with a service they have become reliant on (and I think a reliable service is what Apple intends to supply) then let them. Obviously you've never had your parents teach you how express yourself politely. Kind of think you'd have a different tune if the person you are trashing was standing in front of you - got to love the Mark Zuckerburg Generation.

zaxdad said:

If you want 99.999999% availability - go find a service provider the provides business-level SLAs that guarantees this in writing - they are out there... hope your "business" can support the cost of such a mission critical service - but for some reason I doubt.

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I reside in Germany the same as Tozzi (According to his info on the post), so let us presume his frustration is caused by similar problems to myself.

In recent months, the .me service has been very erratic here for me - about every third day there would be some time where the service would be down for up to 30 minutes. This would lead to anything from the service going offline in mail, to the annoying request for the password, which would try to take, and then pop up again. This stops you doing anything else in mail, so it is retry, or cancel, in which case Mail is no longer looking for new .me mails so you don't know if some have been sent to you and you cannot see them. Sometimes the online .me service still worked sometimes not. I switched to iCloud ahead of the June 2012 deadline hoping the problem was a from-.me-transition thing, but I still get frequent short term outages. And now this is the second of two long outages in two weeks.

I am self-employed - a one-man Business, and part of my Business involves information and files being passed back and forth between myself and various people/organisations. Sometimes I have been in the middle of email "conversations" with several people over several different projects when the service goes down. then I have to let everyone know they suddenly need to send/resend to one of my other accounts.

Yes, I can move to another service for my business emails of course, but it is frustrating when a paid for service is less consistent than my private gmail or aol accounts which are for free. Up until these past few months, mail has been great!

So Zaxdad, lighten up on Tozzi, eh? He is not on about just this outage, but all the others we have had here recently! Everything is relative, and your (good) long-term experience is not his, or mine!

mailhojo said:

I think if people want to express their issue with a service they have become reliant on (and I think a reliable service is what Apple intends to supply) then let them. Obviously you've never had your parents teach you how express yourself politely. Kind of think you'd have a different tune if the person you are trashing was standing in front of you - got to love the Mark Zuckerburg Generation.

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Well put mailhojo. Much more concise than my reply.

And come to think of it, we don't actually know if Tozzi IS a Dark Lord of the Sith or not! Maybe this IS Death Star Frustrations (I mean, they never got to finish the second one properly. "Fully Functional Death Star" my **s!!)

@ Tozzi, would you like to comment on these rumours?

SMTP server is still down for my Mac
EDIT: Back up.

Simply Peachy

Comment away Peachy... did I strike a nerve? (by the way, do not let my sarcasm make you feel that I have any ill will towards you or Tozzi at all - thank you Mailhojo for reminding me about my manners).

However, you guys are all missing the point of a CONSUMER service... You are running your business on iCloud and previously MobileMe? Seriously? Does Apple market it that way? Do they offer SLA for business owners. If they do, then I am clearly in the wrong and apologies abound to all of you.

Like I said, and since I liked your comment on the Dark Lord of the Sith so much (seriously - that was good ! ), if you are doing mission critical work on iCloud and your livelihood depends on it, YOU are making the mistake Padawan... I don't really care how good Apple marketing says it is... use your head. Do you call Sears to get your computers fixed too? No you don't because you would not trust them to fix your business computers would you?

If you can't pony up for a COMMERCIAL service provider for your business ventures- then YOU are making the mistake.

If Apple is having more problems in Germany than in the US? Who knows? Figured there would be some further clarification. If true, and I have no reason to believe you would be lying, ALL THE MORE REASON TO GET A COMMERCIAL PROVIDER WITH GUARANTEED SLAs and stop whining about the free service that delayed your mails for a few hours a few times this year.

The consumers will let Apple know if this is unacceptable when THEY SWITCH to something else like the recent NetFlix debacle.

Point is that if it is affecting your business - then perhaps a FREE (or next to free at $99 per year) is NOT THE RIGHT WAY to go...
I mean you could write a letter to Apple, maybe you can get a refund for the downtime (at $99 per year and considering a down time of oh, I don't know, four hours, maybe?, that works out to about what, $0.045, less than one US nickel?) Seriously?

@ Mailhojo, just because one has allowed themselves to be placed in a precarious position, does not mean that they can shift the blame. If these guys run their "businesses" on a free service of any kind (apple or otherwise) then SPARE ME already.

And for the record Mailhojo, if Tozzi and Peach were sitting here, I would tell them the exact same thing with the same exact level of sarcasm. I am sure they are both fine fellows... although this kind of carrying on about their business and Apple email is ludicrous and I am calling it out.

If it matters, again, I am smiling this entire time, no ill will intended towards either of them - but crying that your business is suffering on a forum such as this because the FREE service you use was down is amazing... and pompous does cover it as well. Sorry that you disagree.

Carry on...

macpeach55 said:

Well put mailhojo. Much more concise than my reply.

And come to think of it, we don't actually know if Tozzi IS a Dark Lord of the Sith or not! Maybe this IS Death Star Frustrations (I mean, they never got to finish the second one properly. "Fully Functional Death Star" my **s!!)

@ Tozzi, would you like to comment on these rumours?

Click to expand...

zin said:

As far as I know, iWork on the Mac doesn't automatically upload documents to the cloud. You have to sign into iCloud.com, and drag and drop onto the web interface, then it will become iCloud-available.

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I am sure Apple made most people believe that iCloud would sync iWork documents will all your devices, including your Mac. The slogan was: 'Every doc, every edit, everywhere'. As Appleinsider was citing Apple back in August:
"Which means you can view and edit the same document (…) on all your devices."
http://www.appleinsider.com/article...d_apples_new_documentsdata_cloud_service.html
I think for most people their Mac counts as one of their devices as well. I even think to remember that John Siracusa and/or John Gruber were publicly musing about how the Mac part would be implemented, ie, whether you would have to place your iWork documents in a special folder for this to work.

Here is another person who understand the keynote back in June such that Documents in the Cloud would of course include synching with the Mac:
http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/1/2529565/will-iwork-on-mac-get-an-update-for-icloud

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adildacoolset said:

Apple, don't make me go back to Gmail. I hate the ads and the overall stale interface. iCloud is waaaaay cooler.

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Unless you are forced to check your e-mail on Windows machines (or machines that aren't your own), why would you ever need to see the Gmail interface, just use your preferred client and IMAP?

zaxdad said:

Comment away Peachy... did I strike a nerve? (by the way, do not let my sarcasm make you feel that I have any ill will towards you or Tozzi at all - thank you Mailhojo for reminding me about my manners).

However, you guys are all missing the point of a CONSUMER service... You are running your business on iCloud and previously MobileMe? Seriously? Does Apple market it that way? Do they offer SLA for business owners. If they do, then I am clearly in the wrong and apologies abound to all of you.

Like I said, and since I liked your comment on the Dark Lord of the Sith so much (seriously - that was good ! ), if you are doing mission critical work on iCloud and your livelihood depends on it, YOU are making the mistake Padawan... I don't really care how good Apple marketing says it is... use your head. Do you call Sears to get your computers fixed too? No you don't because you would not trust them to fix your business computers would you?

If you can't pony up for a COMMERCIAL service provider for your business ventures- then YOU are making the mistake.

If Apple is having more problems in Germany than in the US? Who knows? Figured there would be some further clarification. If true, and I have no reason to believe you would be lying, ALL THE MORE REASON TO GET A COMMERCIAL PROVIDER WITH GUARANTEED SLAs and stop whining about the free service that delayed your mails for a few hours a few times this year.

The consumers will let Apple know if this is unacceptable when THEY SWITCH to something else like the recent NetFlix debacle.

Point is that if it is affecting your business - then perhaps a FREE (or next to free at $99 per year) is NOT THE RIGHT WAY to go...
I mean you could write a letter to Apple, maybe you can get a refund for the downtime (at $99 per year and considering a down time of oh, I don't know, four hours, maybe?, that works out to about what, $0.045, less than one US nickel?) Seriously?

@ Mailhojo, just because one has allowed themselves to be placed in a precarious position, does not mean that they can shift the blame. If these guys run their "businesses" on a free service of any kind (apple or otherwise) then SPARE ME already.

And for the record Mailhojo, if Tozzi and Peach were sitting here, I would tell them the exact same thing with the same exact level of sarcasm. I am sure they are both fine fellows... although this kind of carrying on about their business and Apple email is ludicrous and I am calling it out.

If it matters, again, I am smiling this entire time, no ill will intended towards either of them - but crying that your business is suffering on a forum such as this because the FREE service you use was down is amazing... and pompous does cover it as well. Sorry that you disagree.

Carry on...

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someone needs to step away from the coffee.

decaf. decaf. decaf.

get your blood pressure checked too. yowza!

I agree with you. Your message is right. The delivery needs some work.

I'm wondering how many people saw this article, tried to use iCloud knowing it could be broken, then came back to the forum to complain about it? - But wouldn't have otherwise even bothered trying to use iCloud today.

Lee Adama said:

someone needs to step away from the coffee.

decaf. decaf. decaf.

get your blood pressure checked too. yowza!

I agree with you. Your message is right. The delivery needs some work.

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By the current (horrific) standards of Internet behavior, zaxdad has been nearly gentlemanly. Plus his (?) point is well-taken.

Tozzi said:

Well, I did pay for it (MobileMe), and the me.com e-mail address is the one I have communicated to my business partners, as it's the one I'm receiving push emails on, supposed to reach me spam-free and immediately on all my mobile devices as well as on my workstation.

Recently though, it has become the most unreliable one and I am not amused by that.
For me, it's unreachable for the second time this month right now which means I do not receive potentially important e-mails at the moment.
Not really acceptable.

Click to expand...

Boo Hoo, business, really !!! Knowing what you just revealed, I wouldn't do business with you.