Have a read of this quick report from reader Jay in Hong Kong. One of his friends Dan posted this note on a social media group:
It’s the first new year’s eve since the launch of iMessage. Will Apple’s servers hold up? Can they teach the MNOs a thing or two about scaling? History suggests not but I guess we’ll find out!
Jay responded:
That would be a no! It’s midnight here in Hong Kong, and trying to send *any text* with iMessage enabled results in “Message send failure” – turning off iMessage, and the mobile operator handles it just fine.
So I guess even just the lookup of “is this an iMessage person” was failing… ouch!
My son was due out of bed at about 530am (teething at the moment) so I didn’t bother doing the whole New Year thing. I was in bed by 10pm I think. Life as a father with a toddler, eh? So I didn’t get to see if iMessage performed nicely during the midnight rush. How did you find things? It raises interesting questions about Apple’s ability to truly scale to significant volume. One imagines that Hong Kong wasn’t doing THAT many iMessages, surely?
Worked quite happily for me, before, during and after the bells.
Good feedback!
I actually had major delays on iMessage before Christmas. I was on a train with my other half and we were messaging each other back and forth (both on iOS5) away from prying ears (more because we can have a bit of a joke doing this) and we noticed that iMessage was delaying messages by minutes (more than five minutes for a few of the messages). We turned iMessage off and SMS was working just fine. Was very annoying. In fact, I have only just turned iMessage back on after seeing this post. I don’t think iMessage fails over to SMS/MMS easily enough.
It doesn’t actually seem to fail over for me Barry-Jon. I end up waiting ages for the message to send then it fails then I get the option to resend. It’s a bit fisher price still.
But when it’s working, I like it!
Yea, I do like it. Especially good for free international MMS. Though I was reminded how good WhatsApp is before Christmas when meeting a friend he sent me his location using that app, which I thought was pretty cool.