iCloud Mail Down for Second Day

September 12, 2012 — by Per Christensson

Today is the much anticipated release of the iPhone 5 (or the new iPhone, or whatever Apple decides to call it). While I am excited for the release, my excitement is tempered by the fact I have been unable to access my Apple iCloud email for the past 30 hours.

I've had my iCloud email account for ten years. It started as a .Mac account, then migrated to MobileMe, and eventually became part of iCloud. In the past ten years, I have never experience an outage more than one hour. So this 30 hour disruption is rather disconcerting.

The good news is that Apple is aware of the problem.

The bad news is that Apple seems to be in no rush to fix the issue, most likely because they have committed most of their support resources to the iPhone launch today.

I have several personal emails that I was expecting yesterday and I have been unable to view them, let alone respond to them. A few messages regarding appointments and meetings are especially important and I have no way to access them.

This mail outage, while frustrating, is a good reminder for me of how dependent I have become on the Internet. Fortunately, I am currently only missing a few email messages. It would be much more problematic if I lost access to all my personal and work files.

While tech companies are pushing us to store more and more data in the cloud, it is important to always keep a local copy of your data. Storing your data online can be convenient, but you may not always be able to access it.