Stephen Withers
Monday, 28 July 2008 06:19
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
The new status report reads like a blog, and is written by an anonymous official at CEO Steve Jobs' behest. It promises "new info hot off the presses even if we have to post corrections or further updates later."
Apple is maintaining its previous position that only one percent of subscribers were affected by a mail outage. That doesn't seem to match the proportion of users that have been complaining of mail issues, so my interpretation is that the company is talking about a serious outage quite apart from any initial glitches that seemed to have a widespread effect.
How serious? For that one percent, it took two weeks for web mail access to be restored, and Apple says it could take another week for complete restoration of full email access. As if that wasn't bad enough, the status message says "We particularly regret to report the loss in the affected accounts of approximately 10 percent of the messages received between July 16 and July 18."
More generally, the status report explains that Apple has added server capacity and tuned the software to respond more gracefully to traffic spikes.
70 MobileMe bugs have also been fixed. As usual, Apple fails to list them all, mentioning only that they affect the synchronisation of IMAP folders between web mail and Mail or Outlook, display issues in Calendar, and general performance enhancements.
Friday's posting said an update would be made over the weekend - there's nothing so far, and it's gone 4pm on Sunday in San Francisco.
Does all this reveal a chink in Apple's armour? Please
read on.
