Apple MobileMe authentication issues

Anthony Caruana
Saturday, 11 December 2010 21:49

Your IT - Mobility

Customers of Apple's MobileMe cloud service have been reporting issues over recent days, with accounts seemingly inaccessible. Users enter their password but the account rejects the credentials. Although reports from across the globe suggest something is being changed by Apple we're not so sure.

Some Apple news sites are reporting that users with short or weak passwords are being locked out of their accounts until they reset their accounts. While we're not against the idea that users ought to use strong passwords - especially when personal data, such as that held by MobileMe - it would seem to be heavy handed for Apple to have changed the rules without any notice.

Our own MobileMe accounts have experienced this over recent days. However, status messages from Apple's MobileMe monitoring service provides no explanation other than 'Some MobileMe members were unable to access MobileMe applications at me.com. Access to MobileMe was still available on desktop applications, iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Normal service has been restored'.

It would seem that MobileMe suffered from some other issue that affected user authentication. However, the problem seems to be resolved. We haven't had any problems with any of our test accounts over the last few hours so it would seem that MobileMe authentication is OK for now.