Widespread MobileMe outage affects 75% of users

Apple’s MobileMe service has been down for the past few hours, with the system status page indicating that email, web apps and Find My iPhone are affected by the outage. Email is not working right now for 25% of users, with the number having been as high as 75% earlier today, according to a report by MacRumors.

Although issues with MobileMe services are not uncommon, widespread outages like this are rare. The problems that do occasionally crop up usually only affect a tiny percentage of users and largely go unnoticed. Apple is preparing to launch its iCloud service as a replacement for MobileMe very soon and this may perhaps be related to that, but we have no way to be sure.