The outage message from Apple

Apple's MobileMe suite of Web services suffered another outage on Monday that affected an unknown number of its users.

Of the included services, Mail was inaccessible for approximately two hours. Earlier in the day we had received scattered reports from users who were unable to access their mail. Those reports were later confirmed both through Apple's MobileMe status ticker and Twitter's real-time search tool. For those affected, all other aspects of MobileMe were reportedly up and running.

Monday's problems centred on a lack of access to Mail on three fronts: through the Web, on the iPhone, and on IMAP for use on desktop email applications. The same thing happened in mid July, with enough blow back to cause Apple to offer a 30-day extension to both free trial and paying users.

Despite the known outage, there hasn't been an update to the MobileMe Status Blog since 29 July. The blog was provisioned specifically to address any known issues with the service. For now, most of the chatter has been on Apple's support discussions with dozens of threads from users frustrated by the lack of communication and lost productivity.

As a reminder, if you're a MobileMe subscriber with continuing issues, Apple has a special customer service chat tool for you to access.