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Two Weeks Later: MobileMe's Uptime Calculated (96%)

Two weeks after Apple announced that all MobileMe systems were up and operational after a rocky transition, there continue to be sporadic reports around the web of various service outages inclusive of a 4.5 hour mail outage yesterday. But has MobileMe gotten more reliable?

According to Apple's MobileMe status history, there have been approximately 13.5 hours of various downtime over the past two weeks (336 hours); that is, MobileMe has a 96% overall uptime over the past two weeks.

Determining whether 96% is good or bad can be subjective to the user. This editor and user of MobileMe has hardly been affected by the outages but other users may have been more affected by the timing or the content of the outages. In general we would consider a consumer-oriented service such as MobileMe to have an uptime of at least 98% which would effectively half the downtime that MobileMe currently experiences.

Walt Mossberg has expressed similar sentiments, saying that currently MobileMe is far too flawed to be reliable.

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46 months ago
Of course offering the stats based on a period you set, is not nearly as interesting as the stats on Mobile Me's history, in my case I'd say that figure could be as low as 50-60% uptime.

96% is awful for this service!
And I personally believe some individuals will have it worse than that.
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46 months ago

In general we would consider a consumer-oriented service such as Mobile Me to have an uptime of at least 98% which would effectively half the downtime that Mobile Me currently experiences.

Why such low expectations? Computers don't need rests. Apple doesn't need to work on a tight budget. What aspect of the Internet / Apple's hosting software requires 2% downtime?
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46 months ago
Well I'm definitely not moving in their direction for anything - even a free account. :rolleyes:
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46 months ago

Why such low expectations? Computers don't need rests. Apple doesn't need to work on a tight budget. What aspect of the Internet / Apple's hosting software requires 2% downtime?


Scheduled maintenance to perform updates, etc. Typically business-grade systems have above 99% uptime. I just think it's a little presumptuous to expect that of something targeted at consumers (kind of like how server-grade hard disks have higher mean time between failures than consumer-grade hard disks).

That being said, 96% is too low.
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46 months ago
Well I missed a whole week on top of that 13.5 hours. I'd like to see what that percentage would look like if it applied to the whole month. I can't complain though, Apple shut me up with a free years mobileme.
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46 months ago
First off, I am holding on to hope....

MobileMe has not worked out for me at all. My set up is Macbook, MM, iPhone, PC (vista/Outlook 2007 in corporate setting). My goal was to sync my work contact and calendars with my personal info and have them all on my iPhone. The mac side seems to work after a couple of weeks of flubs. At first, calendars on mac did not sync at all, then OK. Then contacts duplicated, then only partial sync (about 20% synced). Then only names synced with no e-mail addresses, no phone numbers. That appears to be working ..... for now.

PC syncing has never worked well. I understand that the corporate setting may be impacting me (proxies, firewalls, etc.), but I understood from the presentation Steve Jobs gave earlier in the year, that I would be able to do what I want. Sync my work stuff with my other stuff.... on my iPhone. As of yesterday afternoon, my work PC won't even log into MobileMe.

I am glad MobileMe is working for most and I am still holding on to hope. Let the updates begin.
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46 months ago

Well I missed a whole week on top of that 13.5 hours. I'd like to see what that percentage would look like if it applied to the whole month. I can't complain though, Apple shut me up with a free years mobileme.


Yeah, obviously if you take into account the extended outage at the beginning the percentage goes WAY down. But I think that taking that into account doesn't give an accurate description of the current state of MobileMe. The article is supposed to look at the reliability after the rocky transition finally finished, i.e. 2 weeks ago.
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46 months ago
interesting... gmail was out for about that long yesterday as well...
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46 months ago
I think that Mobile Me will have a higher uptime in the future, when they get over their starting hurdle. Currently the downtime calculated over apples initial stat is going to make the numbers look low
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46 months ago
I wonder why Apple gave up on the MobileMe Status blog. They promised an update last week that never came.
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