"Less than 1 percent" of Apple iCloud users were unable to access iCloud mail, Apple acknowledged Wednesday.
Some customers posted to an Apple support forum on Wednesday, complaining that they had been unable to access the mail service for about 30 hours. For its part, Apple issued its acknowledgement of the problem at 7:08 AM PT on Wednesday, noting that "<1%" of iCloud Notes and Mail users were affected.
"Users may be unable to access iCloud mail. Normal service will be restored ASAP," Apple noted.
According to a Feb. 14, 2012 presentation by Apple's Tim Cook, Apple has about 100 million users that use iCloud, meaning that a million or fewer customers were affected by the outage. Apple launched iCloud last October, as a replacement for its Mobile.Me service. Apple provides up to 5GB of free storage for music, docs, or photos, not including a new Photo Stream photo-synching feature, or purchased apps, docs, or books. iCloud also stores your email, contacts, and calendars and pushes them to all your devices. One of its most famous uses is to store music, known as iTunes in the Cloud.
Users complained that they could not receive any email at all, including spam. Several also noted that pop-up messages had asked them to purchase more available capacity, even through they were not near their limit at all.
"iCloud email not working for me, London UK, since late morning Wednesday," GowanC wrote. "Spent about 1.5 hours on phone to Apple. Only when call escalated to senior support that they said other people had had problems and they too on their iCloud account."
"Attrocious idea of service, relying on customers to report outages," GowanC added. "Looking for more reliable email service. Any ideas? I too rely on iCloud email, and this is not the first outage. MobileMe anyone!!"
This week has been a poor one for email service providers. On Tuesday, Google reported issues with its Gmail email client. That outage only affected less than 2 percent of the company's users, or possibly as many as 7 million customers.
Motorola recently forced Apple to disable push email services for iCloud in Germany.
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