Apple had acknowledged over the weekend that some alarms would not work properly on Saturday and Sunday, but said the problem would resolve itself on Monday, according to numerous reports in the tech press.
As the workweek dawned, however, the social networking site Twitter was awash with reports from users who said their alarms had failed to sound.
Among them was Jeana Lawrence, a marketing executive from Houston who wanted to wake up at 5:30 a.m. but didn't stir until 7:19 -- 41 minutes before she was supposed to report to work.
She missed her workout and had to skimp on breakfast.
"My schedule is like clockwork and when the alarm clock does not work, my schedule does not work," she said.
Lawrence said she was aware of the alarm issue that cropped up over the weekend, but took Apple at its word that the problem would resolve itself on Monday.
"Apple is usually reliable when they make public statements about bug fixes, so I'm surprised that it did not work today," she said.
Apple did not immediately return repeated telephone messages left with its media hotline on Monday.
The problem reportedly involves alarms set for one-time use, not repeating alarms that are set to sound, for instance, every weekday. To dodge the problem, the company told users to set all of their alarms as recurring ones during the weekend, according to press reports.
It's unclear how extensive the problem was on Monday. Some users on Twitter reported their alarms sounded properly.
But many of those whose alarms didn't work were frustrated.
"So, is my iPhone alarm just not going to work this year?" one Twitter user posted.
Heather Rasley, community relations manager from Naples, Florida, said she wasn't upset with Apple because of the glitch, even though it caused her to miss her 5:30 a.m. wakeup and a chance to use the family car to run some much-needed errands. Her mother took the car instead.
"Bugs happen," said Rasley, who wasn't aware of the glitch when she set her alarm. "But it's bad PR to not notify users of this type of issue directly, instead assuming that they will be plugged into media over a holiday weekend to catch the company's statement."
The problem is the second for Apple's alarm clock application since November.
(ALEX RODRIGUEZ)
In the first case, the application didn't properly register the changeover to standard time from daylight saving time for some users, causing alarms to activate too late.
That problem, which affected only recurring alarms, was repaired with a software patch.
No comments:
Post a Comment