With iMessage outage, another hiccup for iCloud

For a couple of hours Monday, users of Apple’s iMessage app reported their messages were not being delivered. A quick survey by tech blog 9to5 Mac revealed that the outage wasn’t universal: 47 percent of respondents said iMessage wasn’t working for them, while 44 percent said it was working just fine. Luckily for users, the issue appears to have been mostly resolved.

Apple isn’t new to outages with its cloud products. Just last week a partial iCloud email outage affected just a little over 1 percent of Apple’s users, for which Apple apologized. There was another in late June that specifically concerned iMessage, and yet another in November 2011.

Even if the outages are brief and fixed relatively quickly, they can begin to pile up. iCloud is the centerpiece of Apple’s overall strategy — all of its devices are supposed to work together seamlessly and iCloud is a huge part of that pitch. Every time there’s an outage, the impression that Apple isn’t really on its game when it comes to cloud stuff persists. And that’s too bad, since one of the main points of spending so much on iCloud and building a credible cloud solution was to make people forget about MobileMe.



GigaOM