Multiple iCloud services down, iMessage and Photo Stream among affected [u]

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Apple's iCloud faced a fairly wide ranging outage early Thursday, with service like iMessage, Photo Stream and Backup & Restore down for some [updated].

Update: All services returned online before 11:30 a.m. Eastern on Thursday.

iCloud Status
iCloud system status for Thursday. | Source: Apple


According to Apple's iCloud system status webpage, the downtime started at around 12:30 a.m. EDT and has continued for nearly six hours as of this writing.

Affected services include iCloud Documents, Photo Stream, iPhoto Journals, and Backup & Restore. iMessage users are also seeing trouble and may not be unable to send or download attachments. Late Wednesday, Apple also noted a brief period in which users were unable to create an Apple ID.

Less than one percent of users are affected by the outage, though that number could be in the millions given iCloud now has over 300 million members.

While not as pervasive as the iCloud and iTunes service outage seen in June, which affected some 20 percent of users, today's downtime hits some of the service's main features.
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 41
    gatorguygatorguy Posts: 24,176member
    href="http://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/">webpage</a>, the downtime started at around 6 a.m. EDT and has continued for over half an hour as of this writing..
    The webpage actually shows the outage started before 1am EST if I'm reading it correctly, so about 7 hours so far.

    Edit: Apple just invited me to participate in a survey too. Cool.
  • Reply 2 of 41
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    Apple is prepping for iOS 7 support. Seems like these outages happen a week or so before a new release of iOS.
  • Reply 3 of 41
    gatorguygatorguy Posts: 24,176member
    edit
  • Reply 4 of 41
    Maybe Apple should consider less in the way of stock buyback and more on infrastructure?
  • Reply 5 of 41
    pinolopinolo Posts: 91member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by patrickwalker View Post



    Maybe Apple should consider less in the way of stock buyback and more on infrastructure?


    Fully agree. It is fine for the online store to be down before the release of a product in order to create buzz and draw anticipation. But it is a total joke to have your services disrupted every couple of weeks any time Apple "sneezes" and for no apparent reason.


     


    Whatsapp is much better. And they are much smaller and have a larger installer base. So, I assume, messaging is not that difficult. Yet Apple cannot manage to maintain it to a sufficient uptime level.


     


    Yep, the more I think of it the more of a joke it is.

  • Reply 6 of 41
    macxpressmacxpress Posts: 5,801member


    Yay! iCloud is down again! Oh but iCloud never goes down right? Come on fanboys...you can back Apple up, I know you can do it!

  • Reply 7 of 41

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by pinolo View Post


    Fully agree. It is fine for the online store to be down before the release of a product in order to create buzz and draw anticipation. But it is a total joke to have your services disrupted every couple of weeks any time Apple "sneezes" and for no apparent reason.


     


    Whatsapp is much better. And they are much smaller and have a larger installer base. So, I assume, messaging is not that difficult. Yet Apple cannot manage to maintain it to a sufficient uptime level.


     


    Yep, the more I think of it the more of a joke it is.



     


    But we have to think of those poor, unfortunate and downtrodden executives in the boardroom who need to worry about the growth in value of their stock options.

  • Reply 8 of 41


    icloud is such a joke, how can anyone tell it's down?


     


    No FTP service anymore, no ability to host a domain here.   Calendaring is quirky, doesn't play well with Exchange any more (other users I interact with) and seems to be getting worse.


     


    I'm in the process of moving everything off of it.


     


    There have been rumors of an improved iCloud, but it will need to be mighty good for me to switch back to it.


     


    S

  • Reply 9 of 41


    I noticed yesterday when I sent texts via Mac I got the replies pushed to my iPhone but not to my Mac. At least not for a few minutes which is bad for an instant messaging service. They need to fix those iCloud issues asap.

  • Reply 10 of 41
    philboogiephilboogie Posts: 7,675member
    They should replace the blue color for 'Maintenance'; in the detailed Timeline it now looks like there is scheduled maintenance for eternity.

    [IMG ALT=""]http://forums.appleinsider.com/content/type/61/id/30189/width/500/height/1000[/IMG]

    Seriously, no problems here at my end: I tried all services that are supposedly having trouble - they all work.
  • Reply 11 of 41
    pinolo wrote: »
    Fully agree. It is fine for the online store to be down before the release of a product in order to create buzz and draw anticipation. But it is a total joke to have your services disrupted every couple of weeks any time Apple "sneezes" and for no apparent reason.

    Whatsapp is much better. And they are much smaller and have a larger installer base. So, I assume, messaging is not that difficult. Yet Apple cannot manage to maintain it to a sufficient uptime level.

    Yep, the more I think of it the more of a joke it is.

    According to the article, it's less than one percent of their users for less than a day, not all of their cloud services, and iMessage still works over the cell phone network. Could be millions of people, but it could be less than that as well. I want 100% uptime, too, but you guys have pretty high standards if this seems like a joke.
  • Reply 12 of 41
    philboogiephilboogie Posts: 7,675member
    icloud is such a joke, how can anyone tell it's down?

    Looking at their system status page?
    No FTP service anymore, no ability to host a domain here.

    Warned in advance. Well in advance.
    Calendaring is quirky, doesn't play well with Exchange any more (other users I interact with) and seems to be getting worse.

    Works at my end, even connect to Exchange Servers in different domains. It really 'just works' at my end.
    There have been rumors of an improved iCloud...

    "If it's not on AppleInsider.com we don't know about it"
    S

    Last name 'slash'?
  • Reply 13 of 41
    lkrupplkrupp Posts: 10,557member


    What would you people do in an actual emergency? You're running around with your hair on fire because iCloud is limping along. I was working for at&t in 1988 when a fire destroyed the Hinsdale, IL central switching office, near Chicago. It took almost a full month for any kind of service to be restored. There were articles in the newspapers about how people were "coping" with the disaster. Some putz lost his job because his girlfriend couldn't call him in the morning to wake him up. Businesses lost tons of money.


     


    What would you do if the Internet went down? Go out and blow your brains out because you can't complain about it on some blog? Get some kind of grip will you.

  • Reply 14 of 41
    lkrupplkrupp Posts: 10,557member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by PhilBoogie View Post



    They should replace the blue color for 'Maintenance'; in the detailed Timeline it now looks like there is scheduled maintenance for eternity.







    Seriously, no problems here at my end: I tried all services that are supposedly having trouble - they all work.


     


    Maybe that's because the article states that less than 1% of users are affected?

  • Reply 15 of 41
    nikiloknikilok Posts: 383member
    Neither do I experience any issues here. It's going fast like usual.
  • Reply 16 of 41
    Maybe Apple should consider less in the way of stock buyback and more on infrastructure?

    They're waiting for a 'wire transfer' from the NSA...
  • Reply 17 of 41
    arlorarlor Posts: 532member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by lkrupp View Post


    What would you people do in an actual emergency? You're running around with your hair on fire because iCloud is limping along. I was working for at&t in 1988 when a fire destroyed the Hinsdale, IL central switching office, near Chicago. It took almost a full month for any kind of service to be restored. There were articles in the newspapers about how people were "coping" with the disaster. Some putz lost his job because his girlfriend couldn't call him in the morning to wake him up. Businesses lost tons of money.


     


    What would you do if the Internet went down? Go out and blow your brains out because you can't complain about it on some blog? Get some kind of grip will you.



     


    A very fair complaint, but some of Apple's competitors -- even bigger ones (e.g. AWS) -- manage more uptime. 

  • Reply 18 of 41
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    Maybe Apple should consider less in the way of stock buyback and more on infrastructure?

    Their iCloud service is not all that reliable IMO. I've seen the following errors with iCloud backup despite it reporting enough backup space:

    https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3738935?start=0&tstart=0

    Had to hard reset the device to get the error message away, which is very un-Apple like because not everyone knows how to hard reset their devices:

    https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4684517?start=0&tstart=0

    No other option but to delete iCloud backups as it kept doing the same thing after a few days. They have hundreds of millions of customers so it's understandable that sometimes things will get messed up but so does Facebook, Google and even a small company like Dropbox (400 or so staff). Apple tried to buy DropBox at one point but were turned down. It would be a pretty big investment:

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/02/07/why-is-dropbox-worth-more-than-4-billion/

    and perhaps not worth that just to get an improved iCloud, which they might not even achieve.
  • Reply 19 of 41
    appexappex Posts: 687member


    Nothing like having the stuff in site. Cloud? No, thanks!

  • Reply 20 of 41
    Everything is fine my end using iMessages, Email I don't use Photo-stream.

    It's not a global outage and has shown is only iCloud not Mail app etc…

    Wow what happened to my post all of what I wrote is gone except the 1st line & the 1st line of second paragraph?
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