Today, iTunes Match went down. Yesterday, it was iMessage and FaceTime. Since launching iCloud to the public on October 12, 2011, Apple just hasn’t been able to keep its cloud-based services airborne.
Sure, the most basic iCloud plan is free, but iTunes Match costs $35 a year. As a replacement for the MobileMe catastrophe, iCloud has been anything but excellent. It’s painfully unreliable. Here’s a rundown of Apple’s biggest cloud failures over the last 13 months.
October 13, 2011: Just a day after the public release of iCloud, users in the Apple forums report that documents will not sync from iCloud to iPhones and iPads.
October 15, 2012: At just a week old, the servers housing Siri’s brains go down. Users complain that they can’t ask Siri stupid questions about the meaning of existence.
October 17, 2012: A Find My Friends outage keeps Apple nerds from using the service to spy on their hot roommates. Soon no one will care enough about Find My Friends to bother with whether or not it is down.
Siri down. Ok useless now.
— John Heaton (@JohnRHeaton) November 3, 2011
November 3, 2011: Siri goes down again. People complain because they haven’t yet realised that Siri is broken.
November 11, 2011 Less than a month after launch, users report the first major iCloud outage.
November 28, 2011: A few weeks later, iCloud mail and notes go down. Uh oh, is this going to be a pattern, Apple?
March 21 and 22, 2012: After months without major incident, users report problems downloading iTunes in the Cloud content to Apple TV.
April 17 and 18, 2012: iCloud mail outage. Again.
June 20, 2012: iCloud outage leads to limited access to Photo Stream and late delivery of iMessages.
July 31, 2012: Some iCloud users cannot access old emails.
I hate when Siri starts acting stupid
— DesireeDawson (@SunnyDBeauty) September 7, 2012
September 7, 2012: Siri is down again. Nobody cares.
September 11 and 12, 2012: Users can’t access iCloud mail for two days.
September 17, 2012: iMessage goes down. It has been almost a year! This is getting ridiculous!
October 25, 2012: iMessage and FaceTime go down for several hours.
October 30, 2012: For the second time in a week — and more than a year after the public launch of iCloud — iMessage and FaceTime are unusable due to an outage.
November 18, 2012: iMessage and Facetime go down. Again. WTF, Apple?
November 19, 2012: Just a day after suffering through iMessage and FaceTime outages, users report iTunes Match difficulties.