Sporadic Siri outage leaves iPhone 4S users without their virtual assistants

By Molly McHugh November 3, 2011

The beloved and already meme-worthy iPhone 4S feature, Siri, is experiencing its first glitch. Twitter and the rest of the blogosphere are lighting up with reports that the voice control application is inaccessible, responding to requests by saying “Sorry, I am having trouble connecting to the network.”

Siri works by connecting to Apple’s servers to grab the information you need, and is a core feature of the iPhone 4S. In fact, the minimal refresh was nearly overshadowed by the virtual assistant technology that is integrated into the latest model alone. A Siri-less iPhone 4S is essentially an iPhone 4 with a better camera.

siri down — Image used with permission by copyright holder

It’s the first significant hiccup for the Siri technology, but it’s come so soon after its release that users are likely anxious that they shelled out for an upgrade with core technology that has serious connectivity issues. The outages and spotty service began being reported nationwide around 11 a.m. PST this morning.

Apple has said that restarting your Wi-Fi connection and then your phone might do the trick, but hasn’t promised that this isn’t a network failure problem.

We experienced minor connection problems with Siri, asking the service to search the Web. The first time, we were told there were network errors. But other requests, and then a second go at Web searching were successful. That is, until we tried another iPhone 4S and were unable to connect (see screenshot at right).

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Before coming to Digital Trends, Molly worked as a freelance writer, occasional photographer, and general technical lackey…

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