iMessage goes down: someone tell Taylor Swift

Apple’s iMessage service is reportedly suffering from widespread problems, with users unable to send or receive messages. iMessage is Apple’s equivalent of SMS, allowing iPhone/iPad users to send text and photo messages to one another, without dipping into their mobile tariff’s message allowance.

9to5Mac reports of widespread issues with iMessage, although the problems seem to by dying down now that America has gone to sleep. Users on social media networks have reported that messages are not being sent or are taking an inordinate amount of time to be delivered. Others have reported that messages are being sent as both an iMessage and SMS. SMS is used as a fallback option by iMessage when users do not have a reliable 3G/4G data connection, or when they’re sending messages to non-Apple device users.

Apple’s System Status page is reporting no problems with iMessage, suggesting either the company isn’t aware of the problem or that it’s a relatively isolated outage. Although iMessage isn’t trending on Twitter – normally the first indication of a major problem – there is a large volume of people complaining about the service.

Perhaps the outage will be finally solved when Taylor Swift gets an error message. The pop star’s complaint about Apple’s failure to pay artists during a trial period of the forthcoming Apple Music prompted the company to quickly change its mind over the weekend.

Maybe Taylor can send Eddy Cue a message to get the engineers on the job? Although we suggests she uses Twitter rather than her iPhone.