Without going into too much details, tonight after mad birthday celebrations (where I spent too much time being tired drunk instead of too-much-dancing drunk), I came home to an email from Apple concerning the .Mac outages. Their claim, which I believe, is that there have been equipment problems. They claim the vendor has not been able to promise no more problems in the future, and work is underway to install new equipment.
Hopefully this works out well for them and for us subscribers, and it's nice to be notified. In the past, when the service was free, I didn't mind outages and interruptions, but as web services get integrated more and more into desktop applications and environments, service availability is going to be a critical issue. Hopefully having paying subscribers will offset the high cost of service availability. Large scale web services like
.Mac, whatever
Microsoft .NET My Services morphs into, and other large offerings require more than just a single web server sitting in California. Backup, caching, and location issues abound for service providers. Even Userland's "Radio" servers have had problems in the past (but have run smoothly now for months). Other services, like
LiveJournal have also had availability issues, and in fact LiveJournal is closed to free accounts that don't come in off of a referral.
There are some other weblogs about
Web Service Strategies that have better details than I can offer about the aspects of web services beyond SOAP, REST, or however the basic protocal is spelled for you.