How Immobile Is MobileMe?
News Analysis. There are numerous reports that MobileMe is pushing up daisies. Not so fast. Some reports of the service's collapse are exaggerated. |
The Unofficial Apple Weblog asks, "Are you affected by MobileMe mail outage?" Macworld also piped in with "MobileMe fracas continues." Computerworld says, "Users scream over blackout, now in sixth day."
No question, MobileMe is off to a rocky start. The service had ongoing problems during the launch that seemed to have been resolved by the middle of last week. Now some users can't get e-mail.
Because of the confusion over how widespread the outage is, I contacted Apple for comment, which turned out to be essentially the same statement as posted in a MobileMe support document.
"On Friday, July 18, 2008, we experienced a serious issue with one of our MobileMe mail servers," Apple spokesperson Bill Evans told me this afternoon. "This issue is currently affecting approximately 1 percent of MobileMe members. Affected members are unable to send or receive email at www.me.com or access e-mail using any e-mail client software such as Mail on a Mac or Microsoft Outlook on a PC."
I really shouldn't say this, but I'd be relieved to be free of e-mail for six days. But I understand that for many folks—particularly iPhone users looking for some of that push e-mail love—the outage is annoying, or worse.
"We understand this is a serious issue and apologize for this service interruption," Bill emphasized. "We are working hard to restore service." Maybe, but hasn't Apple heard of redundant servers? A five- or six-day outage is a long time.
How many people is that 1 percent? Last August, when announcing iLife '08, Apple revealed there were 1.7 million .Mac subscribers. Assuming that Apple organically added new customers and got a boost from iPhone 3G buyers, the MobileMe numbers should be at least 2 million. So that works out to, what, 20,000 people? Even one is too many if you're the one. TUAW has sources saying 2 to 3 percent. Twenty thousand people is a lot, but to me not excessive. But 40,000 or, particularly, 60,000—assuming 2 or 3 percent—is big-enough reason to exclaim, "Immobile Me!"
Personally, I've had no troubles with MobileMe since July 12 or 13. I'm not one of the 1 percent of troubled folks. But that's not saying Apple shouldn't have done better. Two million, or more, paying customers is reason enough the service should be up all the time. Five or 6 hours is marginally OK. But five or so days? On Monday, I blogged about the Amazon S3 outage. I'll reiterate what I expressed then: For Web services, nine-nines reliability isn't enough.
I've been getting good value out of MobileMe. I like the service more than expected. The push e-mail to my iPhone 3G really works well. It is push e-mail. There was some blog griping last week about the 15-minute sync delay from PC or Mac to MobileMe. Oh, please, get a life. My RSS service/reader pushes down feeds, but only as often as 30 minutes. I would prefer more often, but the increment doesn't make it any less push. If you're not manually fetching the data, but it's coming to you, then the service is push.
Apple should definitely compensate customers without e-mail service. Really compensate. How about one month for each day the service is down? Put that in writing, now, on the MobileMe support site. The one-month-per-day promise would reassure aggrieved MobileMe customers and remind Apple technicians about the urgency of the problem. It's funny how fast problems get fixed when there's money to lose.
If you're one of the affected customers, I'd like to hear about it, either in comments or by e-mail.
[Please send your tips or rumors to watchtips at gmail.com]
Comments (7)
Not that i'm affected, but that the services goes bye bye for 6 days for 1% of users...
20000+ users without email for six days?? To me that sounds like a badly planned DR procedure in full swing... restoring a multi-terrabyte data set from whatever crazy backup systems they have...
I guess that's an example of the time-to-restore criteria that can't be overlooked when designing backup methods and DRPs...
I simply cannot think of another reason this could take so long.
Posted by whatever | July 23, 2008 7:54 PM
MobileMess or meMobile
Seems to be a it and miss situation.
There are a lot of people complaining about problems. To date, I have been lucky. This is probably because after I got my iPhone on Friday, I was out of town for the weekend so after setting up the iPHone on my Mac Friday evening (all my email settings etc were synced perfectly) I was off and did not have to deal with the MobileMe issue until my return on Monday and by then, there were very few glitches.
Posted by PierreB | July 23, 2008 9:06 PM
The outages aside, MobileMe is such a mess that even Walt Mossberg doesn't recommend it.
Posted by JohnJ | July 24, 2008 10:21 AM
I'm a part of the 1% and I'm now a humiliated Apple fanboy. My days of glorifying Apple to all of my friends and co-workers have come to an end.
I think for most users, our disillusionment comes not from the inexcusable service outage, but, rather, Apple's silence, arrogance and pompous complacency.
And, we're not just angry. We feel betrayed for having been Apple's greatest PR reps for many, many years.
If you talk to people, show them that they are valued and keep them informed, they will generally cope with almost anything. In this case, Apple has shown us what we really mean to them - we're just a number - 1%
Posted by Melvin | July 24, 2008 11:27 AM
I'm not an iPhone owner, but I've used .mac for my primary email account for ~7 years.
Over the past couple years, .mac has been awful - major downtime, mysterious server outages where emails are not sent or received and are lost forever, and absolutely no useful support at all.
I'd been reluctant to make the permanent switch over to one of my gmail accounts, but being affected by the migration to MobileMe has pushed me over the edge. .mac/.me is really a shocking contrast to my uniformly positive experiences with the rest of Apple's products and services.
Posted by xelan | July 24, 2008 1:05 PM
I have 2 iMacs and the normal internet service. My dot Mac was "improved' without my consent. Since then, I have NO email service.
Quite frankly, in this issue, Apple's service technicians have displayed a level of incompetence that I did not believe they were capable of.
Posted by PeterB | July 24, 2008 4:05 PM
I will never read any of your articles ever again. Your findings don't make any sense and you write about technology as if you don't know anything about it. You probably still shop for your computers by going to a local Circuit City and asking the sales clerk what he recommends you get.
Posted by Dan | August 8, 2008 9:41 AM