Some iPhone users had a burning question to ask the device's much-vaunted personal voice assistant application on Thursday: "Why aren't you working?"

What they got back were bland answers such as "Sorry, I am having trouble connecting to the network," and "I can't answer questions right now. " A rising star featured in 4S commercials and darling of the mobile world, the female-voiced Siri can be forgiven for needing a day off.

Overworked?

With as many as 5 million of Apple's newest smartphones sold since their early October launch, users have been sending queries fast and furious, such as "what's the weather?" and "where is Puss N' Boots playing?" Those queries evidently have been inundating Apple's cloud servers, which translate the words into data and send responses.

An outage of new technology isn't unusual. Last month Research In Motion's servers for its BlackBerry messaging and data systems went down for several days across a wide geographic area, and Verizon Wireless faced an embarrassing shutdown of its long-term evolution, high-speed data network in April just four months after it launched.

"This is not that big, yet," said Ramon Llamas, a wireless analyst for IDC Research.

On the scale of recent Apple snafus, he said, last year's Antennagate, in which iPhone users complained about reception problems stemming from the iPhone 4's unique double-band antenna, takes the cake, while the connectivity issues with AT&T's network rank second.

"Having Siri break down is a distant third, because you can still use your phone," Llamas said. "It's something people are addicted to and something for Apple to address but it's not insurmountable. When you get right down to it, it's still very new, still a beta, so it's going to have some teething pain."

Indeed, the problem seemed to be fixed by Friday, although it did come on the heels of...

2011-11-04 22:47:17