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

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  • Reply 61 of 85
    alexnalexn Posts: 119member
    alexn wrote: »
    It was OK for Twitter to crash because that was in 20XX. It's now 2012 and I demand PERFECTION…

    That's still twenty ex-de-ex, though. Think you mean 200X. Just call them the naughties.
    …Twitter is the current Gold Standard(TM) of connection stability.

    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).
  • Reply 62 of 85
    alexnalexn Posts: 119member
    Maybe people misread the headline as "Apple's iMessage and FaceTime [B]o[/B]ffer another significant out[B]r[/B]age" ;).
  • Reply 63 of 85
    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.
  • Reply 64 of 85

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by AdonisSMU View Post



    obviously I was kidding...but when blackberry was having much less outage problems with its bbm service we were all high and mighty like it couldnt happen to Apple and now its a weekly reoccurence.


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

  • Reply 65 of 85


    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.

  • Reply 66 of 85
    begbeg Posts: 53member


    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...

  • Reply 67 of 85
    rogifanrogifan Posts: 10,669member
    The more general issue I have is this: for a company that is so brilliant on so many fronts, Apple seems to have this puzzling history of sustained mediocrity on just about every one of its networked product offerings.

    It just does not seem to be in their DNA. I think they should consider outsourcing it.
    And with Eddy Cue picking up Siri and Maps...that's a lot of responsibility....
  • Reply 68 of 85
    rogifanrogifan Posts: 10,669member
    Maybe we're seeing more reasons Forstall is leaving Apple. iOS 6 has been quite buggy.
  • Reply 69 of 85
    Couldn't use FaceTime yesterday evening in the NL, whether with iPhone, iPad or Mac. Don't know if it is related, though.
  • Reply 70 of 85
    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.
  • Reply 71 of 85

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by philipm View Post



    The big wonder is that it doesn't happen more often.


    Indeed.

  • Reply 72 of 85

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Phone-UI-Guy View Post



    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.




    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.

  • Reply 73 of 85


    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.

  • Reply 74 of 85
    vorsosvorsos Posts: 302member


    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.



    dpnorton82 View Post


    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?



    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.

  • Reply 75 of 85
    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
  • Reply 76 of 85

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by ankleskater View Post


    This begs the question of who/what is a fair comparable.


     


    Facebook is effectively a cloud service (where we store our social history, photos, etc.). Its up time is quite remarkable.


     


    Amazon is serving up music and movies primarily in US, but its Amazon Web Services have an international reach, and AWS is rock solid.


     


    Twitter breaks down periodically but, surprisingly, seem to be robust during "rush hours" such as Superbowls and the Prez Election.


     


    Netflix serves up higher volume of data (movies) to a lower number of customers than the above. Its up time is spotty.


     


    Google serves up a variety of cloud-based services (mail, search, movies, storage, etc.) and its up time record is also pretty decent.


     


    Apple has had a spotty record in serving mail, messaging and cloud-based storage. On the other hand, does anyone else serve up as much music and movies (particularly on a global scale)? I don't know iTunes' up-time record but my personal experience is that it is far superior to Apple's messaging service.


     


    Overall, not only is Apple serving a larger number of customers than most. Its services have become possibly the most diverse on a global scale. So it's hard for me to imagine comparing Apple to the oranges of crowning another company to be clearly superior in cloud-bases services.



    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.

  • Reply 77 of 85
    gatorguygatorguy Posts: 24,176member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by seanie248 View Post


    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.

  • Reply 78 of 85

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Gatorguy View Post


    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.

  • Reply 79 of 85

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Gatorguy View Post


    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.



    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

  • Reply 80 of 85
    gatorguygatorguy Posts: 24,176member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by pedromartins View Post


    Not at all.



    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.

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