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

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.

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!

Users Affected: Some

lol I haven't seen anyone say they can access icloud

Yeah but as a general rule of thumb people are loudest when they complain.

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.

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

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.

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.