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Today, iTunes Match went down. Yesterday, it was iMessage and FaceTime. Since launching iCloud to the public on October 12th, 2011, Apple just hasn’t been able to keep its cloud-based services airborne.
Sure, the most basic iCloud plan is free, but iTunes Match costs $25 a year. As a replacement for the MobileMe catastrophe, iCloud has been anything but excellent. It’s painfully unreliable. Here’s a rundown of Apple’s biggest cloud failures over the last 13 months.
October 13, 2011: Just a day after the public release of iCloud, users in the Apple forums report that documents will not sync from iCloud to iPhones and iPads.
October 15, 2012: At just a week old, the servers housing Siri’s brains go down. Users complain that they can’t ask Siri stupid questions about the meaning of existence.
October 17, 2012: A Find My Friends outage keeps Apple nerds from using the service to spy on their hot roommates. Soon no one will care enough about Find My Friends to bother with whether or not it is down.
November 3, 2011: Siri goes down again. People complain because they haven’t yet realised that Siri is broken.
Siri down. Ok useless now.
— John Heaton (@JohnRHeaton) November 3, 2011
November 11, 2011 Less than a month after launch, users report the first major iCloud outage.
November 28, 2011: A few weeks later, iCloud mail and notes go down. Uh oh, is this going to be a pattern, Apple?
March 21 and 22, 2012: After months without major incident, users report problems downloading iTunes in the Cloud content to Apple TV.
April 17 and 18, 2012: iCloud mail outage. Again.
June 20, 2012: iCloud outage leads to limited access to Photo Stream and late delivery of iMessages.
July 31, 2012: Some iCloud users cannot access old emails.
September 7, 2012: Siri is down again. Nobody cares.
I hate when Siri starts acting stupid
— DesireeDawson (@SunnyDBeauty) September 7, 2012
September 11 and 12, 2012: Users can’t access iCloud mail for two days.
September 17, 2012: iMessage goes down. It has been almost a year! This is getting ridiculous!
October 25, 2012: iMessage and FaceTime go down for several hours.
October 30, 2012: For the second time in a week—and more than a year after the public launch of iCloud—iMessage and FaceTime are unusable due to an outage.
November 18, 2012: iMessage and Facetime go down. Again. WTF, Apple?
November 19, 2012: Just a day after suffering through iMessage and FaceTime outages, users report iTunes Match difficulties.
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They should ask Google, Microsoft or Amazon for some lessons, or better yet just use their services.
They already are.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/02/icloud_runs_on_microsoft_azure_and_amazon/
Here’s a funny story; a very large organisation I am familiar with (at professional capacity) have recently moved the vast majority of their communication systems to “the cloud” – Google’s cloud. Essentially using the corporate versions of gmail, Google Drive, Google Talk, Calendar, etc. Well, it’s over a week now that they can not sync their calendar appointments.
I have been involved in many migrations and I can tell you that “teething” problems are a rule a not an exception.
“Teething” problems are the rule for any large system at any point in time. In this instance it is Apple, tomorrow will be Google, a day later Microsoft – who already had their fair share of problems with Hotmail. Only Amazon’s elastic cloud has me impressed but their user base is a much smaller number, mainly businesses.
13 months is more of a “walking” problem rather than a “teething” one.
Hehe, true
Magical.
These outages would be annoying in a free service, in a paid service they are downright unacceptable. If you regularly cannot get hold of your data for extended periods with no acceptable explanation then you should get a refund.
It is free.
“Sure, the most basic iCloud plan is free, but iTunes Match costs $25 a year.” – you will have to forgive me for not knowing all of Apples pricing for it’s services since I don’t have anything to do with them.
Yea, everyone gets free iCloud but I think you can pay for more data or pay for iTunes Match £15.99 per year.
Every cloud company has issues. Apple has a heck of a lot of traffic from every iOS device witch automatically has iCloud turned on for contacts, back up’s, calendars, text, emails, all personal information etc…
I have never had any issues with backing up on iCloud or for that sake iMessages haven’t messed up since the beginning.
FMI have you got your Nexus 4′s yet?
Yes
Lucky ducker!!!
Yes
Any product can have issues for any number of reasons. This is why I have skydrive, google drive and dropbox all doing the same thing. Do you remember the saying that you should back everything up, the same should be said for cloud access. Never rely on anyone else for your data.
Yes other things such as Siri are affected (which is still in beta anyway), and as stated above, they use Amazon servers anyway.
Not an Apple fan by any means (I actually have come to hate them with a passion), but if it was Google with the issues, most people slagging apple off would be saying that its going to happen, but its great that Google are working on a fix so quick.
I disagree. If people can’t get at their data, they are going to be pissed off no matter who they are with. The difference’s between Apple and Google’s cloud services are that Google doesn’t charge you for them and that Google has massive redundancy means that total outages are rare and short lived. It’s what you would expect from a company who makes it’s money on the net as opposed to someone just using the net as an additional service.
Thats not toally true. Both Apple and Google have free services (funnily enough both 5gb) and both of them have paid services… iTunes match £21.99 a year (music service) or £28 a year for iCloud storage and Google $2.49 + fee’s a month cloud storage
Google did fuck up on the Nexus 4 release.
And people were and are complaining, even the ones that got lucky.
Even the ones who got lucky because their friends got lucky.