MobileMe Suffers More Outages

MobileMe, Apple's wireless syncing service, suffered another blow as its e-mail services suffered an hours-long outage Monday.

A status message on Apple's support page read, "MobileMe members were intermittently unable to access MobileMe Mail using a desktop e-mail application, iPhone, or iPod touch. Access to www.me.com/mail was unaffected. Normal service has been restored."

Some MobileMe subscribers were livid, as this was the latest in a long line of MobileMe problems.

"This is absolutely ridiculous," read one post on Apple's MobileMe forum. "Why pay for a service that is completely and utterly miserable? That is a question that I am consistently asking myself. Getting MobileMe was probably one of the worst decisions I've made."

MobileMe was billed as "Exchange for the rest of us," and the subscription service was meant to supply nearly instant syncing of data between an iPhone and a user's home computer. The service costs $99 per year, and it also can be used to store photos, videos, and other data wirelessly.

But the service has been plagued with technical issues since its rollout a month ago, and it already has had severe e-mail outages, as well as problems with syncing data.

The company already has offered subscribers an extra 30 days of service at no additional cost, and has reorganized the MobileMe management team.

The problems haven't gone unnoticed by Apple's CEO Steve Jobs. In a leaked internal e-mail, Jobs said the service was "not up to Apple's standards," and that it was a mistake to launch it at the same time as the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 2.0 software.

"The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services," Jobs wrote. "And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of the year."