Tough Luck iPhone Users, Apple’s iMessage Is Down Again

[Update: Service on iMessage and Face Time has been restored as of Monday morning.]

What’s going on with Apple these days? Instead of the polished perfection we came to expect over the years, products and services now seem to glitch as often as stuff made by that big company from Redmond whose name begins with “M.” This time iMessage is out, the third time since September. And for good measure, FaceTime is down as well.

I noticed this Sunday afternoon, and a quick check of the Twittersphere, and then Apple’s support page, confirmed the outage, which apparently started around noon Eastern Time. Apple says service will be restored ASAP, but there’s no word yet about why the service went down or what time Apple expects it to be up and running again.

Some users sending  texts on iMessage get an error stating that the recipients “aren’t registered with iMessage.”

iMessage is just what it sounds like – a messaging service for iOS that let’s users send texts to other iPhone and iPad users via WiFi and free of charge. FaceTime, of course, is a video call app. (iMessage was added to OS X a while back, but I suspect most people use it on mobile devices.)

This is the third disruption in the last few months. Outages in October and September left many users with the same message sending issues. Frustrated users jumped on Twitter to spread the word. Most were quite irritated, as one user tweeted “to have to text like a peasant.” Others, like @reganmkemble, at least had a sense of humor about it.  “Okay everyone, I think we’ve established iMessage isn’t working. So just go to your setting and turn it off and stop bitchin,” she tweeted.

World peace, such as it is, is hardly threatened by an iMessage and FaceTime outage. Nonetheless, it is annoying and you’ve got to wonder what’s going on with Apple these days.