Ever since its introduction last month, Siri has proved to be quite trustworthy – and reliable. However, in what is obviously the first outage of the voice based, intelligent assistant, the service went down for a few hours earlier today after Apple servers which are needed to help Siri help you apparently went down – rendering the app partially useless.
iPhone 4S users across the US were flabbergasted to see Siri retorting that it is unable to connect to the network even when the Internet service was fine and other “normal” Internet based functions worked without a hitch. It was also the first time a few people realized that Siri requires Apple servers to be up and running for it to work perfectly.
In fact, the only thing Siri was doing properly was to tell users that it is facing a network issue. The outage was noted at about 11am Pacific Time and wasn’t fully up even by 4 PM Pacific time.
Note that functions which do not require an internet connection like setting up a meeting schedule or scheduling an alarm were working fine. Other features like say checking for weather updates or anything that is Internet based were affected. Apple is yet to release an official statement to tell us users what caused the outage.
Also, this outage made it very evident why it is so difficult to port Siri functionality on devices like the iPhone 4 and the iPad 2 both of which are not on the “supported” list of devices. When Siri functionality was partially restored for many, it was back to its funny self. A user for example asked where she was all day. Her response? “A number of day spas and hair salons!”
[Via VentureBeat]