They were supposed to write back. Except that iMessage stopped working for almost an hour.

• On Thursday afternoon, iMessage, FaceTime and HomeKit experienced outages that lasted almost an hour.

• The outages, rare for Apple services, affected many users between 2:49 p.m. and 3:35 p.m. Pacific Time.

• Android users mocked the iMessage outage, highlighting the ongoing Apple-Google rivalry.

You texted her and she didn’t respond. That’s it for the whole 30 minutes.

Don’t worry. iMessage stopped working for almost an hour, so it’s not you.

It’s Apple.

On Thursday afternoon, the tech giant posted on its system status dashboard that users are “unable to use” iMessage, as well as FaceTime and HomeKit.

According to an Apple update, the outages lasted from 2:49 p.m. to 3:35 p.m. Pacific Time.

“Apple is ruining relationships by disabling iMessage,” user X @onlydioria wrote during technical difficulties.

It’s extremely unusual for iMessage to drop like this. The service has become an integral part of America’s social fabric, and teens who don’t have iPhones are tormented by green text bubbles that don’t display properly in group messages.

Google, the company behind the Android smartphone platform, is trying to get Apple to abandon this stressful form of social stigma. But you know, blue bubbles sell iPhones, so no dice. Even the Department of Justice focused on the green and blue bubble stigma in its antitrust lawsuit against Apple.

That didn’t stop some Android phone users from mocking Thursday’s iMessage outage.

“The message isn’t working. Take advantage of the green bubble,” wrote journalist Philip Lewis in X.

Or you can just try WhatsApp, which the rest of the world easily uses. It keeps working Both iOS and Android. Incredible. It’s like living in the future.

Correction: May 17, 2024 – An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of one of the people who posted about the iMessage outage. It’s Philip Lewis, not Phillip Lewis.

Read the original article on Business Insider