back to article Apple's iCloud goes titsup, email evaporates for unlucky 1%

Apple's iCloud online storage service has been on the blink for 15 hours according to its status page. Fanbois relying on Cupertino's idiot-tax outfit to provide their email have been unable to send or access messages for more than half a day. The iPhone maker stresses that only 1.1 percent of users have been affected by the …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Rain

    If you like clouds you should expect them to rain every now and then......as you are not God you have no control.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Rain

      Apple spend a good chunk of time trying to convince the world that they are gods though.

  2. EddieD

    The clouds part...

    1.1% of Apple's user base is quite a lot of folk.

    I rely on Redmond's idiot-tax outfit and I lost my SkyDrive service for a few hours a couple of weeks back - these things happen. It's a "free" service, we're not paying (up-front) for the massive redundancy that industry requires, so every now and again we'll be cut off. I just don't rely on such things.

    Who backsup the backups...

  3. NoneSuch Silver badge
    Coat

    Its OK folks

    The iCloud 2 will fix all those issues. And the best bit is you only have to re-buy your music and films one more time to finance it.

    My coat is the one with the Android in it.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Its OK folks

        > Your coat was stolen by an android? Crikey.

        No, Kryten.

  4. JDX Gold badge

    Cupertino's idiot-tax outfit

    Good quip but hardly appropriate for a serious story.

    1. Adrian Harvey
      Pint

      Re: Cupertino's idiot-tax outfit

      This is The Register. There are no serious stories.

      1. bill 36
        Thumb Up

        Re: Cupertino's idiot-tax outfit

        If El Reg was on the telly it would be called "Have i got news for you"

        Its a satirical look at the world of science and technology and all the better for it in my view.

    2. kode
      Angel

      Re: Cupertino's idiot-tax outfit

      What can be appropriate for stories about a company that's holier-than-thou but in reality is one of the most unethical companies around? Fanbois see it as their God. Idiot-tax is just perfectly said :D

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "Fanbois see it as their God"

        Actually it is the anti-fanbois who see Apple as Satan.

        I've never saw a fanboi (using your words) say something like "I'll buy it for any price since it is from Apple", but there are plenty of "I'll never buy it for any price since it is from Apple" comments.

        1. dogged
          Alert

          Re: "Fanbois see it as their God"

          I've never saw a fanboi (using your words) say something like "I'll buy it for any price since it is from Apple"

          I have. Also many variations on the "shut up and take my money" theme. Announce a product with a largely redundant screen resolution or that iTV thing they keep blathering about and watch it happen.

          1. zb

            Re: "Fanbois see it as their God"

            I saw it tonight on the BBC World. A rough approximation of the interview went as follows:

            Q: Are you waiting in the queue to buy a new iPhone?

            A: Yes

            Q: Do you know how much it will cost?

            A No.

            Q: Do you know how big the screen will be?

            A No.

            Q: Do you know what new features there will be?

            A: No

            Q: Did you buy the new phone last March?

            A: yes

            Q: If they sell a new version next March would you buy it?

            A Probably

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: "Fanbois see it as their God"

              "will you be buying one?"

              "oh, yeah. I buy almost anything that's shiny and made by apple"

    3. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: Cupertino's idiot-tax outfit

      iDiot, surely?

  5. bill 36
    Facepalm

    its probably spin

    1.1% is probably the amount of all iphone users which translates to 100% of all icloud users!!

    Or am i being cynical?

  6. PassiveSmoking
    FAIL

    I live in Britain, I see more than enough clouds already. One fewer doesn't really matter to me.

    Incidentally, I'm so sick of this "cloud" marketoid BS. Nobody would use them if you called them what they really are, ie "Storage you have no control over, might lose access to at any time, and which any unscrupulous employee of the service provider can snoop on their lunch break, or which can get hax0r'd by some punk in Papua New Guinea"

    A bit of a mouth full, admittedly, but more honest.

    1. auburnman
      Happy

      Noone in marketing is going to call the cloud what it is. Can you imagine?

      Punter: "So what's this Cloud then?"

      SalesDrone: "It's basically online storage tarted up a bit."

      P: "Oh I see. No thanks, I'm pretty sure 'the Cloud' has come free from my broadband provider for the last 10 years and I haven't used it."

      1. Elmer Phud

        It's as if 'finding storage space on a server somewhere' never happened.

        How old is Flickr and stuff like that?

        I remember punting about looking for the best free email service with the most personal storage - they were all beating each other up trying to grab punters.

        Pre-broadband, even.

        (Well, pre-consumer BBand)

    2. ABee
      Trollface

      The Cloud

      "The Cloud" - where all your data is vapour...

      Catch it if you can!

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Cloud?

      It's just timesharing re-invented, with faster modems. Again. Is this the 4th or 5th reincarnation?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh ffs. At the risk of rising to troll-bait, I've had enough. Throwing in a phrase like "Fanbois relying on Cupertino's idiot-tax outfit" isn't objective reporting. OK, so their cloud stuff has gone down - probably because of a total horlicks associated with change deployment for new functionality, "magically" due for release later. The fact that they've stiffed up some changes isn't new, novel, or unique. If you've used Amazon, Microsoft (hotmail), Google et al - you'll already know that this shit happens. Its not good, and someone might need an arse kicking - but its not unique to apple. For fucks sake, if you used GoDaddy for services, you've probably have had sod all service over the last few days. Does that merit their customers getting a slagging from a barely coherent El Reg staffer?

    El Reg - if you fancy yourselves as a little more up-market than Gizmodo, try and raise yourself above their game. And Dear Ms Leach. Piss off back under your bridge, will you? There's a good troll...

    1. kode
      Angel

      Let me guess, you believe what Apple tells you when you happily lick the latest product you bought from them? I used to be a mac user for over 15 years and I saw enough delusional fanbois to know that they let Apple get away with everything. It's never Apple's fault, but if Apple did something wrong *gasp* there's always someone else to blame for it, or someone else who did it MUCH worse. Like you are saying now.

      Apple pretends to be above everyone else, so of course they should be called out when their propagand fails.

      1. Chris 3

        Don't be daft.

        Hang around Mac or iOS user forums and you'll find plenty of users criticising Apple for daft decisions or operational cock-ups. It's you who are producing the crass over-generalisations. The question is whether calling people who use Apple kit "Fanbois relying on Cupertino's idiot-tax outfit" is accurate, insightful, funny ... or just a daft insult.

        FWIW iCloud mail is apparently down for me and has been all morning, luckily I don't actually use the account for anything.

    2. Ted Treen
      WTF?

      @AC 12/9/12 at 11:50

      Ms Leach writes (?) for The Grauniad.

      'Nuff said.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Fanbois relying on Cupertino's idiot-tax outfit

      Well, this comment is more a description of roving Apple fans than Apple itself. In fact, considering numerous staff have mentioned they love their mac books, and other statements that are made to get you all bent out of shape, I'd ask, do you need a cup of coffee?

      It gives me a chuckle, as paying twice as much for a computer to do the same thing on one that requires half the price is, well, an idiotic choice, but I'm sure the Apple fanbase can argue how every single one of them are web designers or "graphic artists" and that only their mac can do what they need to do.

      Have a cup of Java, enjoy little exaggerations, and carry on being the daily BOFH.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      You would have more of a point if they didn't take the piss out of everyone irrespective of if they use Apple, Android, Microsoft or RIM stuff. It's just that Apple tends to crop up in the news more.

    5. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Anon

      "Does that merit their customers getting a slagging"

      Speaking as a complete and utter fanboi, everyone who buys from Apple knows they're paying that little bit extra just because Steve said so. Citation needed? Take a look at the price of RAM on the Apple Store.

      C.

  8. Chris 3

    "Fanbois relying on Cupertino's idiot-tax outfit"

    Comes across as either a bit pathetic or desperate for page views.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "Fanbois relying on Cupertino's idiot-tax outfit"

      The more page views the better for any website supported by advertising. It appears to be working too.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I despise the company Apple has become as much as most Reg Posters

    but I do need to ask: Why an article about Apple and nothing about the GMail outage this week that affected at least as many users?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I despise the company Apple has become as much as most Reg Posters

      "Why an article about Apple..."

      Clickbait. There's something coming up, and they weren't invited, so ...

  10. SMabille
    FAIL

    Finally made it...

    I made it, I moved from the 99% to the 1.1% :-)

    Glad I'm not using iCloud email and it's just a side effect of my iTunes account... down since at least yesterday 1pm (was the first time I wanted to use it in months).

  11. Just a geek

    Users affected 1.1% - sounds really harmless doesn't it? Apple really should list geographical locations and/or actual numbers. They are using stats to hide real figures.

  12. skeete
    Thumb Down

    Nothing good about clouds

    This is in no way aimed at any cloud service, but at the premise alone.. Clouds are destined to be a pile of cack, centralisation means that one error effects everyone and in my experience centralisation like this actually means that the effective run time of any of the drives is amplified and the MTBF from a user perspective massively reduced, their "solutions" introduce multiple points of failure above a simple desktop. Not only this, I have to pay money to a Telco to access my own information - simply ludicrous. My PC has been fault free for as long as I can remember and I keep backups of my work (code, emails, financials). I am only at the mercy of my SMTP provider and I have multiple of those as another backup.. Why would I EVER want to share ANYTHING with a massive corporation that can be hacked, have disgruntled employees, snoop on my photos or location, god forbid "innovate" my work and patent it before me.

    Cloud is for vein teenagers that want to show the world how pretty, stupid and lazy they are that they be bothered or simply can't work out how to copy files from their camera and upload them.

    1. Steve Todd
      Stop

      Re: Nothing good about clouds

      You don't honestly think that they run something like that on a single server do you? It will be on a distributed cluster of machines spread across multiple data centres. Multiple devices could fail and the service will continue like nothing happened. Chances are that it's a much more reliable system than your ISP's mail server, and most folk can't be bothered with setting up their own domain and mail server infrastructure.

      At that level of complexity you're going to get the occasional partial outage due to things like software upgrades or network failures. Annoying, but hardly the end of the world.

  13. Alan Denman

    So it is 98.9% they are taking you for idiots.

    Another meaningless utterance from the economical with the words Apple.

    Only 1.83 million or so users are affected!

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Fanbois relying on Cupertino's idiot-tax outfit

    Personally I put faith in the iCloud services as I believe that they are the most integrated service available today. I've been through various other options over the last 29 years of using tech and I haven't see anything that comes close.

    Anna - What service would you suggest I use instead? Royal Mail?

    1. dogged

      Re: Fanbois relying on Cupertino's idiot-tax outfit

      One that doesn't make you pay for the privilege, possibly?

      I mean, come on. Not even Microsoft do that. That's just skeevy.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Fanbois relying on Cupertino's idiot-tax outfit

        iCloud is free.

        1. dogged
          WTF?

          Re: Fanbois relying on Cupertino's idiot-tax outfit

          Shows what I know. Where is the Reg getting "idiot tax" from then?

  15. nichobe
    Flame

    There goes their 5nines...

    Wonder how many people will actually notice while drooling in anticipation at a fanboi twitter feed...

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Not broken here

    Strange, have been receiving email all day via my iCloud accounts....

  17. Field Marshal Von Krakenfart
    Coat

    It's not eMail, it's....

    ...iMail

    A hologram of crApple's Peve Sods has announced crApples latest iProduct, iMail

    In the prolefeed, Sod's hologram described iMail as a paradigm shift for the iFodder iUsers of crApple iProducts and will the new iParadine for email services, Sods said that one of the defining iFeatures of iMail is that it may be unfast or double plus ungood available. When iMail is plusavailable, users may experience delays wait an iTernity for incoming messages. Normal service will be restored ASAP (Available Service on Android Products).

  18. Crisp

    At least only the privileged 1% that was affected.

    Makes me glad to be one of the 99% for a change.

  19. James Gosling
    Facepalm

    Oh dear!

    I've always enjoyed reading The Register, but is it really necessary to use phrases like "Cupertino's idiot-tax". It just reflects a style of journalism that would have been at home in News of The World and other scummy rags. Can the editors not seek to raise the bar a little?

    1. Field Marshal Von Krakenfart
      Pint

      Re: Oh dear!

      raise the bar

      I'll drink to that

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Is this related to the 1 million IDs?

    I cant help wonder if this is related to those 1 million/ 12 million FBI non related ID's

    With so little info from Apple it is quite perplexing so maybe these are the stolen IDs.

    We have hardly even an Apple misleading statement on this so far.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Who gives a.....

    Just looked at the iCloud support forum and all the ranting; after complete bollocks I had to put-up with this week, a couple of days without eMail sounds like absolute Heaven.

  22. Version 1.0 Silver badge
    Joke

    So it's official?

    Turns out that Mohammed's email account is on that server and the volume of complaint emails has taken that instance down.

  23. PeterM42
    FAIL

    An Apple a day......

    ...Keeps the DATA away.

    Yet ANOTHER warning about the dangers of cloud computing.

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