Apple's iMessage and FaceTime suffer another significant outage [u] - Page 2

Before iOS 6 it was perfect so any change would be a move away from perfect.

There's always maintaining the course and continue being perfect.

If it's perfect then it's already as good as it can get.

Is a baseball player going to quit because he gets a hit on his first at bat because he's batting 1.000? He can always get another hit at his 2nd at bat and stay perfect and so on and so forth.

Not the same thing. The next time he's up to bat he's going for a different run, perhaps on a different game. What the OP stated was that iOS was perfect before iOS 6 and therefore implied that nothing shoudl change because nothing could possibly get better. Even if write that without thinking through the implications we still that iOS should not have changed in any way.

That analogy does not apply, unless you imply Apple should stop making phones completely. Even so, it's still an ill match. If Apple quits after iOS5 (or 6) and iphone 5, there are still many millions of their phones out there, presumably lasting the next 3-5 years.

 

Once a batter quits (after 1st or 10,000 at bat), there will be no presence of him in the game except for history.

All I was pointing out that perfection can continue it doesn't necessarily have to go down.

Of course his claim is purely subjective while my example was objective.

Thanks for the advice. I'll hold off upgrading.

No, you weren't. You are comparing a value to a product. If you say that some set of code is perfect it means it can't be improved upon. What you did was give an example or how you can maintain the average tally. It's not even in the same ballpark. Compare a calculator app that will get a perfect result in all possible calculations as being logically perfect to one claiming the code is written in the most perfect way to be efficiently executed, small, clear, whatever. They aren't the same thing.

But more perfect sets of code can be added. Like I said his perfection was purely subjective. I remember thinking my StarTAC was the perfect phone, let's just say I no longer think that.

My issue with FaceTime is that my sister calls, I answer, and the FaceTime alert still beeps on my iMac even after I've picked up on my iPhone and we're conversing. -- What's up with that?

"Answer the call dpnorton"

They you should be well aware that what you feel is a perfect phone for a given time is not the same as a perfect possible value within a finite set of numbers. You should be well aware that your StarTAC was just the best phone option at the time you could conceive or otherwise known as state of the art, but it was not perfect. It might have even been the perfect phone for you at the time or the most perfect feeling or sounding phone you had ever used but that is perfect used with very distinct qualifiers.

If you can truly define something as perfect it will be perfect forever, like a perfect baseball score or a perfect result from any logical calculation, not a personal feeling.

Well, you've given that idiot exactly what he wanted. 

Well as a pure cell phone I still think it can't be beat, but with the advent of smartphones making phone calls has become less and less important.

Outages I can forgive.

The poorly-conceived, bug-infested, incoherent mess which is OS X Messages? Not so much.

 

I'd like my iMessage/FaceTime contacts to show up in the list of contacts with everything else I have there instead of having to manually type them in and only have their reference in conversation tabs (which I don't keep around when the conversation is done).

 

Other than that, most of the bugs that weren't already there in iChat have been fixed.

Aaaaaarrrgh! A scandal! A scandal! Woe is me!

It was OK for Twitter to crash because that was in 20XX. It's now 2012 and I demand PERFECTION from Apple because they raised the bar of expectation so high and Twitter is the current Gold Standard(TM) of connection stability. How are we going to cope? I demand that Apple pays us all to have therapy to recover from the terrible blight that they have inflicted - nay, forced- upon us. Oh woe is me...

To be fair I must say that I had some trouble around June this year with iMessage on the iPhone 4 - and that was with iOS5, not OS6, and it was between here (Oz) and Lisbon (Portugal).

 

That's still twenty ex-de-ex, though. Think you mean 200X. Just call them the naughties.

 

No one would have believed that when they started out. Funny how… everyone is pretending to ignore this for Apple.

I wasn't sure when those Twitter outages were as I rarely use it (and it isn't on my radar, either). Still, X could still = 0 .

Re the ignoring bit - another example of confirmation bias, amongst other things (like pretending).

Maybe people misread the headline as "Apple's iMessage and FaceTime offer another significant outrage" .

BB is huge in South Africa (unlike Apple) and their big outage was a massive PR disaster. Most other large-scale services have had the odd outage. Google has had a few as has Skype. Anything this big has to fall over occasionally. The big wonder is that it doesn't happen more often.

RIM would go down for DAYS not hours.... 

Apple is pissing me off as of late.  The heck is happening here? From one of poster mentioning that Tim doesn't cut out to be CEO may be true.  He's known to be COO.  I wonder what the board members are thinking about the current situation.

Yup, exactly - BBM went down for days. For a supposedly "enterprise" level product, and to add insult to injury it was right on the eve of an iPhone release no?

 

Far more serious than a few hours of down time that iMessage etc. sees and more mock-worthy because of the timing.

 

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/bbm-still-down-as-blackberry-blames-core-switch-failure-50005594/

 

 

No one is perfect, even AWS was down less than a month ago and took down a **** ton of popular sites with it:

 

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/10/22/amazons-aws-sees-partial-outage-taking-reddit-coursera-flipboard-and-many-other-down-in-tow/

 

Having services go down from time to time does suck, and I sincerely hope it improves with time. Not sure why all the sites have to have big posts everytime there is even the smallest outage for iCloud...

And with Eddy Cue picking up Siri and Maps...that's a lot of responsibility....

Maybe we're seeing more reasons Forstall is leaving Apple. iOS 6 has been quite buggy.

Couldn't use FaceTime yesterday evening in the NL, whether with iPhone, iPad or Mac. Don't know if it is related, though.

Doesn't Apple run these services on a Microsoft Azure backend? Maybe they really do need to do their own services instead of leaving such a growing and critical part of the business on Microsoft's solution.

Indeed.

Apple was using both Microsoft Azure and AWS. But that was before its NC datacenter was up and running. How much it is still relying on Microsoft and AWS is not known. It is now running a combination of IBM/AIX and Sun Solaris at NC. There was speculation that HP Proliant servers were identified in some of leaked photos of the datacenter. Not sure what OS would be running on those.

In fact, I think iMessage and Facetime were not only affected in the US, but also in Switzerland, suggesting it to be a more pan-global dysfunctioning of the two Apple services Apps.

I could be wrong, but it seemed like Messages was touted as a decentralized service at some point in development. Maybe that feature went the way of ZFS in OS X.

The notification is being pushed to both devices through the web, along with a 'never mind' notification when one device answers. Your iMac is receiving those a bit late.

 

To answer another question, if an iOS Message falls back to SMS, I don't think it shows up on the desktop.

wooooo... the FREE service that Apple provides is out for short period !! better call the FBI, CIA, Interpol. It must have caused riots and revolutions !!

If it really put anyone out that much, as in they *rely* on this service for making money, then maybe these people need to grow up and use a commercial service. Get what you pay for is the key here.

Amazing Solutions to Cloud Outages ( these ACTUALLY work!! )
- Photo Stream not showing photos? Wait a while
- iMessages not being sent? Send as text, PHONE the person (how 90's) or wait a while
- Email not being sent/received? Use a different email account, or wait a while.
- Cant FaceTime? Phone the person
OR, why not try going for a walk with a friend, read a paper or watch the news, while you wait a while.

Genocide and famines in various countries done get as much reaction out of people/press space as an hour of iCloud outage FFS. Pretty clear where everyones head is shoved these days

AWS Rock Solid? Come on... do you read the tech news at all... they suffer ALOT. And Netflix is primarily powered by AWS, so if they are spotty, then AWS is spotty.

From my point of view, its much easier to build a system that streams a selected movie/tv show, than one that has all the issues of emil/messaging/music/docs and all the other contact/calendar syncing that goes on across multiple devices. Apple certainly do not have the same good record as Google, but then Googles eco system is not as integrated as apples.

How do you arrive at that? Google has multiple services from email to music to movies to social networking to search to browser to OS that all link together for user accounts. IMO Google has much more to juggle for a much larger audience, probably many times larger.

Not at all.

Never said anything about size of client base.

 

Just Googles setup seems more modular (which can be a much better approach in some ways) 

 

I could be wrong, I have no knowledge of the exact inner working of each companies system, its just the impression i get is that Google is more modular

Is your opinion based on anything at all? 

 

Mine comes from simple evidence like 425M active GMail users as of several months ago, likely approaching half a billion now if not more. 

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/28/3123643/gmail-425-million-total-users

 

Google's Chrome browser also probably exceeds 400M active accounts by now.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/28/google-chrome-now-has-310-million-active-users-most-popular-browser-in-the-world/

 

Or how about over a billion Google Search users a week, and that figure is from two years ago!

http://thenextweb.com/google/2010/09/08/google-we-have-1-billion-weekly-search-users-launching-constant-search-improvements/

 

Not everyone who has Chrome also has GMail and vice-versa so no telling how many unique users there are. 600 million or more? That's not even getting into juggling Google Reader, Google+, Google Cloud, Google Music, Google TV, Google Maps, Google Play, and often across multiple platforms from Linux and Windows users to iOS and Mac . . .

 

Add in Google Search and how many billion requests do you think Google handles in a typical week now.

 

I'll wait for your comparable numbers from Apple.

Edited by Gatorguy - 11/19/12 at 7:50am