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Two Weeks Later: Mobile Me's Uptime Calculated (96%)

Looks like MobileMe is just as big of a joke as was .Mac.

I can't believe people are using MobileMe for something as critical as their business!

Apple never got .Mac to run reliably enough to support mission-critical business operations.

What makes you think MobileMe will be any different?
 
Darkroom said:
interesting... gmail was out for about that long yesterday as well...
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I think there was something going on yesterday with the web as a whole. I work from home and for an hour I could not access our company's main home page to be able to startup a webex. I ended up leaving for a doctor apt, but all seemed to come back ok by the time I returned. All it takes is for one router at an ISP to be down.

What I mean by all it takes is for one router to be down:

I worked for a company that had 1000 PC's in the field. It would be interesting sitting in Greensboro, NC and ping the PC in Raliegh, NC using the command that shows all the hops and watch the packet hop up to Wash DC, then on to Tennessee and then up to Maine and ultimately back to Raliegh.

Some cases when we lost connection on those PC's, I could see that sometimes the packet hopped out west (Indiana) until it came back to Ashville.
 
The seriousness of uptime for me is more about when the downtime occurs. If you're down one hour each day from 4-5AM that would still be bad but if you're down every day at 4-5PM that's something totally different.

If you run servers or have hosting anywhere you'll know downtime will always exist.

My only thing right now is the resolution time.
 
Determining whether 96% is good or bad can be subjective to the user.
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Mmm.... no. 96% is atrocious. That's over two WEEKS of downtime a year. Reliable systems strive for more nines. 99.99% is a nice number that still has almost an hour of downtime a year. If that's all at once, some users will be "very annoyed."

If the downtime is not evenly distributed, or some don't run into it due to time-of-day variations, then some folks might be happy. But it's not "subjective."
 
We feel your pain, and we're sorry
Monday, August 11, 2008 6:05 PM
Posted by Todd Jackson, Gmail Product Manager

Many of you had trouble accessing Gmail for a couple of hours this afternoon, and we're really sorry. The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly. Everything should be back to normal by the time you read this.

We heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts. We followed all the emails to our support team and user group, we fielded phone calls from Google Apps customers and friends, and we saw the many Twitter posts. (We also heard from plenty of Googlers, who use Gmail for company email.) We never take for granted the commitment we've made to running an email service that you can count on.

We've identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we're conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly. We don't usually post about problems like this on our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted. In general, though, if you spot a problem with your Gmail account, please visit the Gmail Help Center and user group, where the Gmail Guides are your fastest source of updates.

Again, we're sorry.
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http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/we-feel-your-pain-and-were-sorry.html
 
Here is an interesting thing about Mobile me. I contacted Apple and never got a reply.

1. My Dell is dying so I uninstalled Office. I could not find an uninstall for Windows Mobile Me.
2. Sync kicked off on my Dell, before I could set the preferences to not Sync (did not even realize it kicked off, and it did not warn me it was about to delete my cloud).
3. Since Outlook had already been uninstalled, MM Sync could not find anything and deleted my contacts and calendar in the cloud.

I did not realize it until I fired up my mac later on, and when that went to sync it gave me a warning that it was about to delete contacts and calendar information on my mac. Luckily I could cancel.

I went into preferences and immediately chose to reset and push to the cloud.

This is a warning for all those who may not have all computers in sync, either due to uninstalling the product, or just not using that one computer for a while.

Maybe this is what happened when other people lost their contact or what ever. Either way, this is not good for people who have multiple computers and do not have them all on at the same time. It could also be a glitch where (and timing this would be hard), where you make an update on one computer, the sync kicks off and before it reaches the cloud, the sync on the other computer kicks off and deletes stuff - then the computer you were just working on gets deleted. Another warning for those who do not have each computer on the same sync schedule - or have long waits between syncs.

I can see this as a huge problem for those who may be onthe road and trying to get and update information on the main company server.

Now with MS exchange, everything is stored on the server - not your PC and your outlook has to be logged onto the server and you are acutally storing your stuff on the server - not the PC. You only archive older emails to your PC.

Mobile Me needs to work like that. But then again - there is the privacy thing, and the storage issues for Apple. With Exchange, technically you are working on a company's network and everything is owned by the company.

It would be nice if MM could work more like exchange. I never lose my exchange information and that also syncs my calendar to my phone. Nice thing about exchange is, I can share my calendar with order users -so if they schedule an appointment for me. They will see if I am busy right away.

This is probably the only time I will say this, where Apple needs to learn from MS and from Google.
 
Veri said:
Why such low expectations? Computers don't need rests. Apple doesn't need to work on a tight budget. What aspect of the Internet / Apple's hosting software requires 2% downtime?
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Exactly most internet services compete in decimals of percentages 99.9999% (down one hour a year) uptime vs. 99.999999% (down 30 seconds a year) uptime. 98% uptime. is a full week of downtime.
 
Yesterday.

I tried to login via MS Exploder 7 and it's still not 'fully compliant' and said that I should use Safari or Firefox. Did I crash MobileMe? I got a message that Mail was experiencing a 'technical difficulty' and something about there being no way to tell how long it will be ill.

Couldn't get email BUT one thing I discovered is that my dot-mac 'web page' is gone. The whole thing, everything. I think it was called a 'gallery' from the old dot-mac and I got a few hits through it and now it appears to be gone. Or did they move them somewhere else and change how you get to them.

Whatever. IE7 compatibility isn't a 'deal breaker' but when I'm on the road and bouncing through client offices I don't have the luxury of installing an 'approved' browser because MobleMe throws a snit.
 
PinkyMacGodess said:
I tried to login via MS Exploder 7 and it's still not 'fully compliant' and said that I should use Safari or Firefox. Did I crash MobileMe? I got a message that Mail was experiencing a 'technical difficulty' and something about there being no way to tell how long it will be ill.

Couldn't get email BUT one thing I discovered is that my dot-mac 'web page' is gone. The whole thing, everything. I think it was called a 'gallery' from the old dot-mac and I got a few hits through it and now it appears to be gone. Or did they move them somewhere else and change how you get to them.

Whatever. IE7 compatibility isn't a 'deal breaker' but when I'm on the road and bouncing through client offices I don't have the luxury of installing an 'approved' browser because MobleMe throws a snit.
Click to expand...

Whoa, you had me scared for a minute when you said your web page is gone.... I just checked my HTTP://WEB.ME.COM/SHERVIEUX and it is still there. I had been working for a few days building this web site.
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5B108 Safari/525.20)

I guess this is to be expected. I did experience outages with .Mac from time to time. I am at least glad that it appears that Apple is hard at work on getting the kinks ironed out. Down time stinks and it will probably hurt business but at least they are trying to fix it.
 
Is it even really worth debating if 96% is acceptable. If it's up 96% of a day, that means it's down for AN HOUR A DAY. 99% (15m of downtime a day) is totally unacceptable also. I don't understand how they can charge with a worse than 99% uptime. This is a bigger disaster than Microsoft Bob.
 
TVGenius said:
This is a bigger disaster than Microsoft Bob.
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:eek: ouch!, I felt that from here. Luckily I never had a computer with Bob - but I had to recover some files from crashed Bob's (including a laptop that had been through a fire - only the case and keyboard was melted, the insides were dirty and full of soot, but the harddrive motherboard and memory was still functional).

From what I seen with it, Bob was an interesting product - it appears the whole OS was an interactive cartoon where you had to walk up and ask Bob permission to do anything and then walk to and pull your file from a bookshelf. Cute for kids, but never could see why they tried to make it mainstream.

Equating MM failure to the failure of Bob may be a little extreme.
 
longofest said:
Scheduled maintenance to perform updates, etc. Typically business-grade systems have above 99% uptime. I just think it's a little presumptuous to expect that of something targeted at consumers (kind of like how server-grade hard disks have higher mean time between failures than consumer-grade hard disks).

That being said, 96% is too low.
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That's ridiculous!

I have mail through AT&T as well as through .mac / MobileMe. I have had the AT&T mail address for 20 years. In that twenty years AT&T has only gone down once for 6 hours to reconfigure the system for a major update.

They perform all maintenance on servers that are offline and just rotate the offline and online servers. AT&T has never lost any of my mail.

By comparison .mac is down at least a little everyday and has lost a some of my mail over the past 4 years.

Just because it is for consumers doesn't mean that it has to be flakey.

Let's face it, Apple is just not very good with large scale network services.
 
I have my iPhone set to check for mail every 15 minutes, and I've been getting email on my MobileMe account at least once an hour for the whole time Apple's switched over. I guess I'm just lucky, but I haven't experienced any downtime. Of course, I go to sleep at night, so maybe that's when the servers are going down?
 
manhattanboy said:
Is anyone having problems with push on their mobile me?
It seems my iPhone never updates anymore and this started yesterday after the mobileme hiccup.
This sucks major balls.
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Yeah, I have a lot of problems with push to the iphone.

Where I live, there is no cell phone coverage at the house. I do have broadband internet with a wi-fi onnection though.

Iphone is suppose to update through the wi-fi with push services but it doesn't work for me. I now wish Apple had a sync now button on the iphone so that I could force a sync manually. I can't seem to get contacts, bookmarks, and calendars to sync manually.

I always wonder what happens if iphone is out of service or is off when a change is made to the cloud data. Will the iphone get the data when it is in service or turned on? Or will it require another change in the cloud while the phone is on to activate an updated push?
 
96% is not acceptable for this service and surely not if it's branded by Apple. Even 99% would not be acceptable. I hope Apple will get 99,9% soon. Less is insulting for all it's customers.
 
Since my fancy new iPhone 2.0 and 2.0.1 software has been so busy crashing, freezing and re-booting for the past month, I'd almost forgotten about all of the problems with MobileMiniMe. Kind of like dropping a safe on your foot will make you forget about your headache. :eek:

Anyways, thanks for the reminder! :D
 
Apparently I'm in the minority. Since MM went live, it has been up 100% of the time for me. I use it almost non-stop throughout the day and evening hours, so I'd notice if it went down. From what I can tell, the push/syncing is performing nicely as well.

I dumped Gmail because of it's atrocious IMAP support and don't plan on going back
 
Whatev

Ugh. MM is still way buggy for me and a few other users I know - which in my little world, is a lot.

Just today, I (again - has happened several times since that cursed 2.0 went live) lost all my Contacts on my original iPhone.
iPhone OS = most up to date.
Mac OS = most up to date.
iTunes = most up to date.
Been with .mac since the free days.
This has all been so uncharacteristically unacceptable.

Maybe I am an anomaly, but I have had a very smooth relationship with Apple for 20 years. These past 2 months have been brutal. And sure, this might highlight how well Apple has done thus far. But it also might highlight how they're slipping. It's hard to know from my limited vantage point. But what I do know is that it's all been just so unApple. Wonder if there is something bigger happening up in Cupertino than I/we realize?

I had planned on passing my wife my original iPhone and upgrading to an iPhone 3G. But I can hardly imagine telling her "OK, now if this happens, delete this account and reenter all your info, or press the Power & Home buttons at the same time, or..." Too much for her. Which is a shame. Prior to 2.0, this device was so solid, so smooth, so responsive, so easy. Since then; sluggish, hangs, crashes, Restores, Resets, etc.
I have felt like a struggling IT manager constantly trying to keep the ship, simply, afloat.

Surely I can't be alone. Wonder how many other long-time Apple users are feeling this same uneasiness?

Just... so... odd...



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