.Mac Outages Take Out Mail / Site

A string of system outages on Saturday and Monday have left thousands of Apple's .Mac members without access to email and access to the www.mac.com website.

Six outages have occurred thus far, ranging in duration from "intermittent" access problems to some users being unable to access mail services for up to 12.5 hours, culminating in the entire mail service being down Monday night for "scheduled maintenance".

Apple claims that in most cases just 2% of their subscribers experienced problems, though one incident indicates that anyone attempting to access the www.mac.com website during a three-and-a-half-hour period could have experienced intermittent problems.

I too, am a .Mac member, and have been unable to access my primary email account all day.

And when you work on the internet, that's a problem.

The system outage log is as follows:

12.17.2007 :: 17:31 - 24:00 PST.
Due to scheduled maintenance, some members might be intermittently unable to access .Mac services until midnight PDT.

12.17.2007 :: 17:06 - 17:31 PST.
2% of members were intermittently unable to access .Mac mail.

12.17.2007 :: 14:06 - 14:37 PST
2% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 30 minutes.

12.17.2007 :: 10:45 - 14:15 PST
.Mac members were intermittently unable to access the www.mac.com website for 3.5 hours.

12.15.2007 :: 07:18 - 19:48 PST
0.5% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 12.5 hours.

12.15.2007 :: 17:30 - 18:30 PST
2% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 60 minutes.

To quote Apple, "With powerful online services that work seamlessly with iLife and Mac OS X Leopard, .Mac makes it easy to extend your Mac experience to the Internet."

Which by and large is true. When it works.

According to The NPD Group, .Mac has been the second most-popular Mac offering at retail so far this year. For US$99, buyers get one year's access to Web-based storage, e-mail and address book syncing between their iMacs and iPhones, among other features.

But while some people love the service, there's no denying that many of .Mac's features can be obtained elsewhere... and for free.

Which leads us to the heart of the matter: .Mac is a paid service, and people—oddly enough—tend to expect more from a paid service. They expect more features, better service and support, and increased reliability.

Especially reliability.

Because when people don't get it, they tend to go elsewhere.

I mean, isn't that why most of us became Mac owners in the first place?

Food for thought.

* * *As of 12/18 2:03AM MDT .Mac IMAP services are still inaccessible.