MobileMe disappears for another 7 hours Apple's cloud vanished for another seven hours over the weekend, depriving some MobileMe users of their email and services despite status reports indicating everything was operating fine. The disappearance was noticed by Pingdom, who monitor the availability of popular services, though Apple isn't admitting the service was …
if this isn't actually a feature? After all, it’s for security isn't it. Keeping the user from not being able to access their own mail is great for security *cough* and it’s so user friendly. They don't even have to look at their mail in the Apple universe, since they can't get it anyhow. Really makes things so much more productive doesn’t it :P
Why they don't just give up on the piece of tat and revert back to .Mac which oddly enough worked! and even supported IE (and before the whiners kick off on the anti-IE rant, remember how many public access internet cafe's, and libraries run IE only, and how it's still the most used browser on this planet, and by removing all support for it just ends up biting MobileMe's users on the ass since they can't gain access to anything in the majority of places). This little perfectly shiny walled garden world which is Apple these days just continues to get more stupid daily.
"Apple's cloud vanished for another seven hours over the weekend, depriving some MobileMe users of their email and services despite status reports indicating everything was operating fine."
To be fair, Demon's pop3 server also went down for some time last night, leaving punters unable to collect mail, and it was a while before their service status was updated too. I'm by no means an Apple fanboi (quite the opposite in fact), but they're not the only ones who can be guilty of this.
"Apple's cloud vanished for another seven hours over the weekend"
No, it didn't.
"Apple isn't admitting the service was unavailable"
That's because the service WAS available...
The problem was with the www.me.com domain.
Normally, if you access that domain, it redirects you to the log-in page at https://auth.apple.com/
That redirect wasn't happening.
If however, you accessed any of MobileMe's services via their direct URL. ie;
http://www.me.com/mail/
http://www.me.com/contacts/
http://www.me.com/calendar/
http://www.me.com/idisk/
everything worked as normal. The service itself WASN'T down - just the main domain redirect.
If you'd bothered to do any research into this story, you would've found the above info easily.
"everything worked as normal. The service itself WASN'T down - just the main domain redirect."
Most users in that space (average clueless user) aren't going to link directly to the sub-site. So, if the DNS is hosed, the site is still "unavailable" to the average Joe. - sorry fanboi, down is down.
It seems pretty apparent that Apple wants to keep doing business as usual, which is telling the people what they need and denying any wrongdoing when things go wrong. Ever. They can get away with it with a stand alone product like an iPod or a laptop, etc, but when you start dealing with peoples everyday communications tools - that they pay for - this isn't going to fly. If Apple wants to get a huge user base like RIM or MS Exchange, they are going to have to get their shit together, keep it together, and be open and up front about the goings on when things go amiss. But we know that won't ever happen, so this product will continue to be a niche Apple thing, people will continue to get treated like shit, and following the all mighty Jobs like blind sheep.
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