Update: As of 3:00 PM Pacific time on Sunday, MobileMe is back online for me, but Apple’s MobileMe status page still lists several MobileMe services as being down.
Around 1:00 PM Pacific time on Sunday, Apple’s MobileMe suite of cloud applications stopped working for me. MobileMe syncs customers’ iPhones with their personal computers. It also serves Web-based email, calendar, and address book applications that stay in sync with customers’ computers and phones.
According to one Twitter post, it’s been down for some users for three hours now. The volume of Twitter updates in multiple languages in the past hour suggests this isn’t a small outage.
Apple’s PR hotline sent me an auto-response, “Our offices are closed for the holidays.” But if I hear back, I’ll update this post with any info Apple provides.
MobileMe, for which Apple charges $99 per year, grew from the company’s .Mac (pronounced “dot-mac”) services. Usually it works — I use it daily — but MobileMe got off to a bad start last year with frequent outages. So much so that even Apple fan Walt Mossberg declared it “too flawed to be reliable.”
MobileMe beats the ad-supported Google Apps and Microsoft’s free Windows Live in some ways, most notably its browser-based replications of the familiar mail, calendar and contact apps built into Apple computers. But for a hundred bucks a year in 2010, shouldn’t it be bulletproof?
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