iPhone 4S users suffer major Siri outage

It looks like Siri is undergoing its first major outage today, as iPhone 4S users take to the Web to complain. Attempting to use the service only results in a kind message from that nice robot lady saying: “Sorry, I am having trouble connecting to the network.” So, if you’re noticing that Siri hasn’t been working, don’t worry, you are not alone.

It hasn’t even been a month since the iPhone 4S was released, yet people are already discovering they can’t live without Siri. A quick search on Twitter makes that evident. Siri is a voice activated “personal assistant” that translates a user’s natural-language question into action. Functions span from digging out obscure facts from Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha, setting appointments, transcribing messages spoken out loud, and lots of other cool stuff. We’ve got a full tour of the features here.

An outage just weeks after its launch could potentially leave a bad first impression with customers who were eager to trust Apple’s first major shift into the cloud. Outages like this are possible because Siri does all of the magical voice search stuff on Apple’s back end, hence the need for an Internet connection to use the service — when it’s actually working, of course. Apple has yet to release an official statement acknowledging Siri’s current downtime, but it did note at the iPhone 4S announcement that Siri was in beta, and therefore may need some stabilization. On the positive side, it’s almost guaranteed this won’t be nearly as severe or elongated as the recent BlackBerry fiasco. How many of you are having issues with getting Siri to work on your iPhone 4S? Or is your service working just fine?

[via TechCrunch]