Extended MobileMe Email Outage Due To Server Issue

[andiwm2003]

.mac was never reliable but clearly mobileme is aimed at a much wider population. and then apple saying they take business customers serious for their iphone while their email service sucks is really an irony.

i guess it's not an easy task to set up a service like mobileme. apple underestimated the challenge. in some way this failure is good because it's a wakeup call for apple to get this service fixed once and for all (all as in 99%)

 

[swingerofbirch]

Feel bad for the people who have to try to upsell every Mac with a copy of MobileMe.

 

[blehpunk]

i've been a member since 2005 and i'm one of the lucky 1%. i just don't know how a computer company with as much resources as apple can't get on top of this after all this time.

 

[richpjr]

If the reported issue of a failure on ONE of their mail servers can wreak this much havoc on their operations, than this company has a LONG way to go before they are ready for the enterprise. Hasn't anyone heard of redundancy and fail safe switch over to other servers?

 

[JPyre]

Also, don't they know of things called backups? They should just go to another server and restore from backup

Yeah... the only problem with that is that you loose everything that hasnt been backed up, and they cant do that...

I work for a newspaper, and more than once during failures we've not restored from backup, too much would've been lost.

We ended up moving stuff by hand for the most part, which is what I bet they're doing right now....

I'd like to say that a 99% success rate for moving millions of accounts from one domain to another in a couple of days is pretty good, but with that many accounts 1% sure adds up quick, sorry

 

[andiwm2003]

................... that a 99% success rate for moving millions of accounts from one domain to another in a couple of days is pretty good, but with that many accounts 1% sure adds up quick, sorry

millions of accounts? i thought .mac had about 500 000 members a year ago. my guess is were talking about 750 000 to a million accounts at most.

correct me if my numbers are wrong. no matter what with the iphone sales in the 10 million or more this service should be able to handle 5 million accounts easily. if they have problems now what does that say for the future? i'm sure it's really just a glitch and they get it fixed. but i guess they will have to hire a bunch of good experienced people.

 

[MacTheSpoon]

Growing pains. But they'll get the kinks worked out, and it'll be awesome.

 

[haunebu]

1% My Ass

Quoted for truth. They can say that just to try and minimize the PR damage. There's no telling how many people are actually affected.

So how are they going to compensate these people? Give them another free extension to a crappy service that doesn't work? Hoo-ray.

I know, I sound grumpy. Just a bit jaded after all this...

 

[queshy]

With pretty much unlimited money I'm surprised this wasn't sorted out much much sooner. I don't rely on their mail service or any of mobile me's features. Thankfully gmail is quite reliable.

 

[stephenli]

painful.
can't receive mail yesterday. Am I the 1%?!
and my webpage is still crazy slow...

 

[gcmexico]

geez!!! Has Apple ever gone through a transition collapse like this before?

 

[macmyworld]

Very pathetic effort by Apple.

I'm not in the 1%, but I have suffered a number of outages before and after the conversion. There are also ongoing issues with sync.

It's bleeping email Apple. Shouldn't be that hard to figure out.

 

[irun5k]

...it turns out the "mail server" is a rack of Mac Mini's with Time Machine as a backup solution.

 

[TheNorthWaves]

I was somewhat skeptical of whether I would use .Mac, now I know for sure that I won't use MobileMe.

 

[Macsterguy]

.Mac in a new wrapper

.Mac in a new wrapper... MobileMe.

Steve Jobs said "This time, I think we got it right"...

I have used .Mac (and now mobileme) for years without (many) problems. I actually really like mobileme... but, Let's face it .Mac has been the "ugly red-headed step child" of Apple for years. It just never worked well or lived up to it's promise for many...

Now the same people that implemented .Mac run MobileMe. What did Apple expect would happen. The only difference is that they have added chat support that doesn't work. No telephone support to help those that are having problems. All for a yearly charge of $99 (or more) per year.

The MobileMe Mail category has over 13,000 messages that have been viewed more than 50,000 times, with many of the messages expressing anger and frustration.

With billions in cash reserve, Apple needs to spend some money and make their customers happy... Very Sad.

 

[kingtj]

Hate to say this, but I pretty much expected as much.

Personally, I suspect the .Mac infrastructure was FAR less than sufficient, for quite a long time (probably ever since its introduction). Apple was coasting along with it because a relative few people made much use of it.

I know back around 2001-2002, I was doing a lot of web development work for a client who hosted everything from .Mac, and I was appalled at the poor performance. Whether it was from my point-of-view as the content creator/editor trying to slowly upload things to the iDisk, or as an end-user, seeing .Mac hosted sites SLOWLY pulling up, even on fast broadband connections -- it just didn't look good for Apple.

I also know that on at least a few occasions, this same client received notices from Apple about email outages and issues too.

When they announced this MobileME launch, I thought, "Wow... Apple's getting pretty ambitious with this whole thing. It's going to take a LOT of infrastructure improvement if they expect this to work right." I think they tried to re-use too much existing hardware and bandwidth, and what was just "poor" before suddenly became totally "unworkable".

I agree that they might actually get it all sorted out this time around. They have too much at stake now. (Many iPhone purchasers are going to rely on this as a primary reason they can justify using the phone ... so Apple can't afford to just leave it "limping along just well enough to make a little profit off the service, and say they have it".)

Growing pains. But they'll get the kinks worked out, and it'll be awesome.

 

[MonaLisa]

Sun hardware?

By looking at the full headers of messages, it looks like Apple is still using Sun's messaging product (Java System Messaging Server) which only runs on Solaris (or maybe Redhat). It's a reasonably safe bet that they are are using Sun Sparc servers for MobileMe. Running mail server clusters with failover is something Sun actually does well, so it would be surprising if this were just a hardware failure. There has to be more to it.

 

[raster]

Well I have been a .mac member since 2004 and it seems to be working fine for me, for now. Are the people with problems, new subscribers or old and new across the board. I am really glad I get to keep mac.com instead of me.com. That is a pretty awful name.

 

[dagamer34]

This feels like the World of Warcraft launch all over again.

 

[ventro]

Quite possibly the worst release Apple has ever had. Hopefully they learn from this.

 

[galactic732]

i am one of the lucky 1%

i have no received any contact from apple regarding the past two hiccups and have not received one on this one yet either.

does anyone know how to contact them to vent my frustration?

luckily i still use my gmail for most things and i was transitioning to mobileme.

im upset a pay service is supplying less quality than my previous free service...

 

[JPyre]

this service should be able to handle 5 million accounts easily. if they have problems now what does that say for the future?

You're probably right on the numbers, but the number of accounts is irrelavant, the problem (I presume) was with the move from one domain to another.

I myself have moved hundreds accounts from one domain to another and it's not easy, even on exchange

The problem is mail is always up and always running, it's not easy moving mailbox stores without causing duplicates, loosing mail, or breaking the mailbox.

That all being said, they shouldn't have tried to do it as fast as they did, and theres no real excuse for not doing it the right way the first time.

 

[oftheheavens]

maybe they should call microsoft and ask for help.......

just playin i love you

 

[W1LLk]

No Email

My account is one of the ones that has had no access for 5 days. This is pure crap.

 

[Stridder44]

I have been a mobile me member since July 10th, I haven't got any apology letter. :-(

Based on the amount of delays it looks like you haven't gotten any kind of letter whatsoever.

This really sucks. People are so going to lose their jobs over this. Be even so, I don't see the point in MobileMe. It doesn't seem that much better than .Mac honestly. I mean it's cool and all, but not $99 cool. Meh.