According to a number of readers and our own observations, it seems iCloud is in the midst of a somewhat widespread service outage that has been going on since roughly 4PM Eastern Time. Users are unable to access mail and other services either via standalone applications on the Mac or iOS, or via the iCloud website.
Apple's iCloud service status website doesn't indicate any issues, which may suggest the outage is not serious enough to warrant a notice or more likely that Apple simply hasn't updated the page yet.
Update: Apple has now added a notice to the system status page acknowledging the outage.
Update 2: Service seems to be restored.
Top Rated Comments
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!
Yeah but as a general rule of thumb people are loudest when they complain.
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.
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.