MobileMe down for seven hours

Visitors to the MobileMe homepage earlier this week were met with an error message. And Apple hasn’t provided a reason for the outage.

The blog Royal Pingdom reported that MobileMe users trying to access the Me.com home page Monday saw this message: “Not Found: Resource does not exist.” Royal Pingdom’s monitoring reported that the outage lasted almost seven hours, from 2:29 a.m. EST to 9:25 a.m. EST. The early morning times meant that the problem largely went unnoticed by U.S. users of Apple’s online-based calendaring, contact, and e-mail tools.


It appears that the issue in question lay with the me.com domain name and not Apple’s service itself. Users were still able to access individual MobileMe services by typing in the URLs directly, such as entering http://me.com/mail to access their MobileMe inbox; http://me.com and http://www.me.com were inaccessible, though.

As should be evident from the nature of the problem, none of MobileMe’s services were hampered and users who didn’t visit the Web version of MobileMe should not have noticed any interruptions.

Apple hasn’t posted any information about this latest hiccup with MobileMe on its MobileMe news page. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Apple launched MobileMe this summer to much fanfare—and also a number of complaints. The rebranded .Mac service had some problems at its initial launch, when many users couldn’t login or sync information properly. Apple apologized for those problems in July and extended users’ subscriptions to the $99-a-year service. That same month, MobileMe was dogged by e-mail outages; Apple offered a 60-day subscription extension in August.

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