Apple's Services Suffering Another Outage as iCloud Sign-In and iTunes Store Go Down

[Intarweb]

This has been happening more and more with Apple. With the disappointing sales figures due to come out, Apple won't be looking good in the eyes of investors. I say good. Let that stock come down!

 

[bozzykid]

I saw a news item that GMail is down for everyone also.

I think you saw wrong. There have been no reported issues with GMail today. http://www.google.com/appsstatus

 

[mkjj]

All working fine here in Liverpool!
iTunes, mail and cloud all as normal

 

[bozzykid]

Typical Apple. They can't do anything right anymore. You think Steve would have allowed this?

Apple's cloud services sucked when Jobs still ran Apple (MobileMe, hello). Stop it with Apple could do no wrong with Jobs was there. They have never been good at cloud services.

 

[maxosx]

Despite iClouds troubles, here's the bigger news of the day...

why apple always sucked on online services?

I don't know, I only know from first hand experience that they are coming across as clueless. Two years of MobileMe and now this....

On the _Big Day_ instead of an update on the front page, we get this about iCloud.

For those who care, here's a link to the live feed to Apple's conference call today, explaining the state of the union so to speak.


http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/13houbqwdvowuhb04/event/index.html

 

[MaxDrago]

But WHY are my iPhone and iPad ok and not my MBA???

iOS apps and desktop apps don't always connect to the target service the same way. One path/gateway may be affected while the other isn't.

 

[bozzykid]

Gmail is flawless!! ...oh wait

Gmail definitely has downtime. However, compared to iCloud, Google's cloud services have much better uptime than Apple's. I'm pretty sure this is now 3 or 4 weeks in a row that iCloud has had a major outage.

 

[rmwebs]

I saw a news item that GMail is down for everyone also.

But hey, the cloud is so super duper awesome.

Gmail been fine all day for me - my gmail checker logs outages, and there have been zero today. They had a 2 hour outage (altho seemingly only for web-access, pop still worked) on the 17th. In contrast, iCloud (specifically, authentication) has had two (big) outages in the last 7 days, so far totalling around 10 hours and counting. This isn't including the numerous short outages we seem to see daily either.

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Why does anybody rely on third-party "cloud services" when NAS is so cheap and easy?

Because a cloud is a million times more reliable than a NAS sitting under your desk.

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It seems to work here again..

iTunes store working here now, but authentication to iCloud services is still down - 4 hours and counting. AppleID is acting up as well.

 

[BJMRamage]

I had problems accessing on MBPro. Phone was fine.
iMessage was fine.

But I noticed I already had another Safari window with iCloud open...that was fine. ONLY an issue when i went to log in.

 

[JHankwitz]

There must be too many clouds blocking Apple's server solar arrays today.

 

[thunderstorm]

Up again here in northern UK.

Not for me!

 

[iSamurai]

Siri isn't working for some reason... Holding the home button but nothing happens. Wonder if this has anything to do with this outage?

 

[rmwebs]

Find My Friends was working for a fre minutes, but then kicked me out and is now telling me my login details are incorrect (which they arent).

Edit: Back up again now.

 

[Plutonius]

why apple always sucked on online services?

I believe it might be cyber attacks over the last month.

 

[TallManNY]

Yep, tried to update apps this morning and download new Yahoo app. Both failed. But three hours later App updates went through. New App downloads still seems to be hanging though.

 

[coolfactor]

I find it increasingly difficult to understand the lack of tolerance for Apple.
...
The Internet is a machine. It is going to break from time-to-time. That’s life.

Yes, but the internet is a brilliant, decentralized machine with built-in redundancy. I believe that's what is lacking in Apple's current setup of iCloud and their online services - redundancy. Things are too centralized, so when one thing goes down, it's called a "global outage", even though it may be affecting only a small number of regions or users.

Amazon, Google and Facebook have better decentralized redundancy, and Apple will get there once they have their new data centres up and running.

It's interesting to watch people react to these events. Early on, people complained that Apple didn't communicate enough. Now with their status page, they very clearly communicate issues, and now people use that against them. So clearly there's more work to do in communicating to keep people at bay, but I think it's a hopeless venture. People just love to complain, even if the problems aren'ta affecting them personally.

 

[thunderstorm]

So now I can log into iCloud on my MBP but my iPhone is still telling me to 'check my network connection' in terms of iMessage. I regret signing out now, I shouldn't have listened to the network advisor

 

[powers74]

Back up for me as of about an hour ago, 11:30~12

 

[ConCat]

But Apple's services do not occasionally suffer problems, they regularly suffer problems. That's why people get annoyed.

It's completely inexcusable. It almost seems like Apple has 0 redundancy for their cloud services. All of Google's services have to go offline from time to time I'd assume, but clearly they have redundancy, so they can achieve 99.9% uptime, as expected from any professional cloud service. It isn't a complicated thing, and surely Apple has the capital to back it up.

 

[Heston]

Can't connect to Gmail via Mail on my ipad mini but iPhone 4S can....

 

[ericinboston]

Welcome to the cloud.

EXACTLY! This is the #1 (out of about 15) reason why I will NEVER put/store my content in the cloud.

Everyone thinks "the cloud" is some magical place that defies physics.

Cloud services will always be powered by its own servers, hard drives, internet connections, etc. and all the baggage that comes with that such as humans to manage the systems, buildings the stuff resides in, possibility of the company going out of business, etc.

 

[Vizin]

.

 

[Bantz]

Apple online services are just pure junk.

 

[jemo07]

Google gmail, twitter, iCloud all having problems today... coincidence?

 

[rmwebs]

Can't connect to Gmail via Mail on my ipad mini but iPhone 4S can....

It's just you. http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status&ts=1366738125260

Google aren't having any Gmail outages right now.

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Google gmail, twitter, iCloud all having problems today... coincidence?

Gmail wasn't having problems today. Google Calendar had a bit of an outage, but Gmail didn't. Twitter was down a couple of hours ago.

It happens. It just seems to happen to Apple a lot more than anyone else due to their 'fakeCloud' setup.