When 'cloud computing' turns dark and stormy

Suzanne Choney • E-mail

In personal computing, it’s always good to have your stuff — documents, photos, music, video — at the ready, backed up, stored somewhere. These days that includes the “cloud,” but as some users of Apple’s new Web-based MobileMe service recently found out, the cloud can be a dark and frustrating place.

Even Web giants Google and Amazon.com occasionally have faced problems with their more-established “cloud computing” services, which rely on data centers around the globe to store, process and deliver information via the Internet. Just last month, some users of the free Google Docs word-processing program couldn’t access documents for around an hour on July 8, and Amazon’s S3 online storage service experienced outages for around eight hours on July 20.

Cloud computing is an exciting notion, and those kinds of inconveniences might not seem huge — until they happen to you.

Apple seems to have resolved most of the problems that left 1 percent of MobileMe customers angry and without e-mail for several days, and longer in some cases. MobileMe, which costs $99 a year, stores e-mail, contacts, calendars and photos “in the cloud,” Apple notes, and also provides 20 gigabytes of storage for each user.

“I was without e-mail from July 18 to July 28,” one MobileMe user wrote in a July 29 e-mail to msnbc.com, adding that he was unable to check his e-mail anywhere else because of the problem.

With Web message boards and blogs buzzing, on July 25 Apple made its first public statement about the debacle, and has since added some posts to keep users informed about MobileMe’s status.

“The day we launched MobileMe, we had a lot more traffic to our servers than we anticipated, with the result that access to the Web versions of the MobileMe applications … was temporarily unavailable,” wrote an Apple spokesperson in one posting.

“We’ve since added server capacity and tuned our software to scale better — i.e., behave more gracefully when traffic spikes.”

And here’s where the posting got really good (not): “We particularly regret to report the loss in the affected accounts of approximately 10 percent of the messages received between July 16 and July 18.”

So, if you were among the 1 percent who couldn’t get your e-mail, you also might have been part of an elite group whose e-mails went into a black hole, never to be seen again. It might be enough to push you over the edge — or at least off the cloud.

Thinking it through
“If you don’t think cloud computing through, there’s certainly plenty of things that can go wrong,” said John Pescatore, Gartner research vice president, who is also a security and privacy expert.

He said most of MobileMe’s problems were likely were tied to its launching the same day, July 11, as the iPhone 3G and a key software upgrade for existing iPhone owners.

“The applications had to be ready by that date, whether they were ready or not,” he said. “That’s probably the biggest part of Apple’s problems with MobileMe.”

It seems Apple CEO Steve Jobs doesn’t think it was such a good idea, either, to put MobileMe out there the same day as the new iPhone. Web site Ars Technica said it saw an Aug. 4 e-mail sent by Jobs to Apple employees, in which he said, in part, “It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the (online) App Store …The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services. And learn we will.”

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