I am an Apple convert, and keep up-to-date with them, and use them as my platform into the computer world.  Now I’m not so sure I did the right thing.

They recently ordained, I think that’s the right word, ordained that internet activities should take place up there in the sky. Or, as they and others call it THE CLOUD.

Fine. We went along with it, and so I now have Mountain Lion (their latest operating system), and my activities were transported into the Cloud.

Then what? Three days ago, I stopped receiving emails! Now, communication, fast communication, is essential in the world of business and social interaction. Work depends on it, jobs depend on it, business depends on it, export/import business especially depends on it.

I spent hours thinking it was me, my computer, my system. Obviously, I wasn’t doing something right! ….. I wasn’t doing something right? So then I called support. They didn’t call me back.

I googled for similar reports, and found that Apple was stating that about 1.3% of their users were having problems with the Cloud, and their send/receive emails.

I found a thread, a long long thread, of worldwide users screaming and hollering, from Seattle to Singapore, from China to Chile. They were being IGNORED!

This user whoever he/she is, puts it better than I can:

The reason so many people are upset is that this was a major violation of trust and respect on the part of Apple.  It is clear that Apple misstated the scope of the problem.  They knew from the first hour that they were dealing with a major system problem.  This was not a communication node down or one mail server farm down.  It effected people world wide in much larger numbers than have been admitted by Apple.  They did not give us updates that were timely.  They hid the problem.

This is not what a business partner does.

But more importantly, this signals a very deep problem for the future of Apple and their company evaluation.  ICloud is a major strategy.  Bottom line is that outages happen.  It is how a company responds that is the hallmark. Apple has failed this test.

The worst case scenario here is that it was not a hack but a bad software load that kept propagating in the system.  This would call into doubt the development of the new IOS.  My point is that without information from Apple we are left to speculate.  Apple should learn that lesson.