What is there to say about it, really? The cloud that thinks different appears to be unresponsive on webmail and POP/IMAP connections for some unknown fraction of the userbase, and it's been having issues since the morning hours today. Mel noted a long slow period yesterday, and also spotted some downtime about three weeks ago. As of 2:30 pm ET, it looks like mail is beginning to flow again for POP users, although IMAP and webmail are still shaking off the jitters.

While monitoring services like Netcraft don't help to track MobileMe email uptime (since the website keeps responding even though mail isn't flowing), it's hard to shake the sense that this $99/year service is costing us more in aggravation than is strictly necessary.

Yesterday, Mobile Me was down again, underscoring how little the service has improved since its introduction last month. Pockets of users have been affected regularly by outages and slowness since the service first came online. MacRumors calculates that Mobile Me has been up 96 percent of the time (that is, down for 13.5 hours) over the last two weeks.

As a Mobile Me subscriber, I wonder if the opening-day trial subscriptions will matter in yet another month: that's when, for many (but not all) the 60-day trial period expires. If those disappointed with the service choose to flee, then perhaps the server load will decrease, and performance will improve for the rest of us.

Of course, we all read Steve Jobs' leaked email, and surmised that he gave many more expletive-laden tirades before the memo was released. We have a promise from the top that service will improve by December, and that's some solace, but what of the meantime?

And what of the blog? Your friend and mine, David G., hasn't posted a thing since July 29, promising an update post that never arrived.

Until then, I suppose all we can do is watch the support page, keep calm, and carry on.

Apple has extended every MobileMe subscription by a month, due to the exceptionally ornery transition this past week.

"The .Mac to MobileMe transition was a lot rockier than we had hoped," Apple spokesman Bill Evans told Macworld. "We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge."

An email sent to subscribers noted that "we have worked through those problems, and the web apps are now up and running," but several pages of comments from our readers suggest otherwise. TUAW staff with MobileMe accounts agreed yesterday that the service is mostly working, but still quirky.

Also in the email, the MobileMe team has promised to stop using the word "push" to describe some aspects of MobileMe's functionality "until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too." This might suggest they're closing the loop on MobileMe's push technology for all connected devices.

Hopefully this goes a long way to assuage the burning, burning rage that MobileMe users have been feeling recently.

(You can read the full letter, after the jump.)

Thanks, Rick, Frank, Mark, Chuck and James for the tip!

CIO.com interviewed AT&T spokesperson Mark Siegel, who confirmed that Friday's activation server outage was due to massive worldwide demand. This may not come as a surprise, but it's the only official comment we've heard.

"The iTunes software appeared to have been so overwhelmed by demand [Friday] that customers were not able to go through that final stage and sync their iPhones," Siegel said.

Apple has not commented on their servers' performance on Friday. Nor have we learned any more about the other great mystery: the details behind the rocky MobileMe transition that lasted Wednesday through the weekend.

The CIO article also discusses Apple's physical supply chain for the iPhone 3G, and how it performed for the rollout. Analyst consensus: top notch. "Good job to Apple for mastering the physical supply chain so well that you have this high-profile launch and your problems are not on the physical side -- you have product in stock," said Kevin O'Marah, chief strategy officer at AMR Research.

[Via Reddit.]

I realize I post this at great personal peril, but Mobile Me appears to be working. Apple has updated the Mobile Me support page with information specific to Mobile Me, and has removed the notice about the update taking longer than usual.

After a rough first 24 hours, Mobile Me services appear to be mostly operational, although for me, Mail is still a little shaky, and everything is still pretty slow.

Even so, Internet Explorer 7 users appear to be left in the lurch: Apple displays a notice for those users saying IE7 is "not fully supported." Apple mentions on its website that Mobile Me can sync IE7 bookmarks, and features the IE7 logo fairly prominently.

Your mileage, as has been the case for the last 48 hours, may vary. It will be interesting to find out in the coming days what precisely happened, and what Apple will do to prevent it from happening in the future.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

According to a few tipsters, the iTunes activation servers that help do everything from activate brand new iPhones to getting new firmware for iPod touches are dead to the world.

Tipster dik said "[A]s of right now, [Apple Retail] has lost all connectivity with the iTunes activation servers. No idea how long this will last, but everyone who is in line right now can expect a MUCH longer wait."

This also affects people trying to update to the 2.0 firmware from home, via iTunes for the iPhone and iPod touch. There's a good chance that's where the "We could not complete your iTunes Store request" errors are coming from. Unfortunately, this means that many users have their iPhones bricked temporarily disabled, and only able to make emergency calls.

Apple is aware of the problem and is working to correct it, according to a discussion thread in progress.

If you have any information about what's happening, feel free to tip us. Thanks!

As Robert mentioned earlier today, the launch of MobileMe has been a rockier road than a Baskin-Robbins convention in the same hotel as a Weight Watchers conference. With .Mac services (including webmail, near and dear to my travelin' heart) down most of the day, all we could do was commiserate with the scores of inbound tip emails and eagerly hit the "refresh" button until the circumstances changed.

Looks like we made it, though -- as of 7 pm ET it seems that most Me.com services are up and running from the web side (sync status TBD). Enjoy the cloudy goodness, if you will.... ulp, now it's down again. Y'know, if the idea behind your new service offering is "Exchange for the rest of us," perhaps the first order of business ought to be ensuring some sort of baseline SLA, or an uptime expectation? The last thing Apple needs is the reliability reputation of some other popular communications service...

Update: Per Apple's support status page for .Mac, all the back-end services should be running as of 2 am ET, but the web UI is still not available and there is no ETA. If you're depending on .Mac webmail from the road, may I suggest a POP download into another (free) email service.

MobileMe has been up and down since late last night like so much rancid Chinese food. We know just about as much as you do: we're getting tips that it's up -- no, wait -- it's down. And now it's back up! And now it's down.

I was briefly able to log in and explore Contacts and iDisk, but was shut out when the site went back down. What I saw was pretty nifty, but without the larger context of app integration, I can't really form an educated opinion on it yet.

I am planning, however, on writing a full-scale review for this weekend. Hopefully the problems will clear up by then -- or at least long enough for me to write the story.

We'll keep you posted on the continuing ups and downs of MobileMe as we get more information. I'm hoping the act of writing this post will provide just enough schadenfreude to get the service running for good.

Thanks to everyone for the uninterrupted updates on this one!

In the Venn diagram of users, the intersection of "Mac" and "Twitter" appears to be quite large. Why this is, I'm not sure, but it's true that many Mac users rely on the short-message broadcasting service for their day-to-day lives.

There's some concern in both communities that the flood of new tweets about announcements at tomorrow's WWDC will break the back of the Twitter infrastructure. Their uptime has been mostly in the 90s this month, with some features still disabled for performance reasons.

Do you think it will hold up? What will do you if Twitter grinds itself into metal shavings?

A poll and results, plus more updates (!!) all after the jump.

Shall I compare thee to a yellow sticky note?

Thou art more foreboding and less indicative of closure.

Rough winds do shake retail commerce before May

And downtime hath all too short a date.

Sometimes too excited the yellow sticky shines

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd

And sometimes when credit-cards decline

By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;

Thy momentary downtime does not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair new product;

Nor shall Apple introduce what wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou waitest;

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

Fair 3M's scrap of parchment shall cheer thee.

Thanks, verily, to all ye who have sent tidings of this news.

In February we covered Pingdom's release of a website badge and monitoring service that tracked the status of the Apple Store. A lot of our readers were resourceful enough to make their own widgets from the banner, but Pingdom has polished up and released a widget for everyone who looks forward to the excited anticipation of downtime hysteria.

The widget, and Pingdom's service in general, have the potential to be a blessing to Apple's servers. By pinging once and distributing the results to the masses, it could prevent thousands of simultaneous connections from refresh-happy Apple fans. Not that the servers haven't always handled the traffic with a fair amount of aplomb; it's just that much more breathing room.

Software releases (Safari 3.1 and a Security Update) marked this Tuesday, but without the bated-breath downtime we'd begun to expect. A little element of scheduling surprise, such as the 802.11n Airport Express release on Monday, makes this widget significantly more useful. So, grab the widget from Pingdom and enjoy future frenzies!