Q: Itunes match stuck at sending information to apple

Agreed, the service is working well in the UK.  As noted on 7 Aug '13:

"Suspect simply routine maintenance." - it must have led to significant equipment failure!

Apple should acknowledge this as one of the worst service loss periods since the early days of adding too many countries at once!

Changes to local setup needed are nil - this issue has been entirely Apple server side.

Feedback to Apple here: http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

Service check / issue log with Apple here:  http://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/

Woke up this morning and iTunes Match is working perfectly.  I also had an email in my inbox from iTunes Store Support FINALLY STATING THEIR WORKING ON THE ISSUE!

Here is the message they left me:

"

My name is Katie, and I’m a Senior Advisor with iTunes Store Support. Amanda consulted with me, at which time I reassigned your case to me. All future correspondence will be directed to my inbox. To acquaint myself with the situation, I have reviewed all previous interactions. From your newest reply, I see you are stuck on the first step of the iTunes Match process. I know how eager you are to have this resolved, and I will gladly offer continued assistance.

Apple is currently working toward a resolution for the issue you have reported. You will receive an email after the matter has been investigated and further information is available.

Thank you for your patience. Apple wants your iTunes experience to be as enjoyable as possible.

Sincerely,

Katie

Senior iTunes Store/Mac App Store Customer Support"

Amusing, but a little late, here is the note in my inbox:

"This is Paul here from the iTunes Store. I understand that you have not been able to connect to iTunes Match. I imagine that you are eager to continue using this feature. I am happy to look into this for you today.

First I would like to apologize for the delay in my reply. Please know that this is not our intention and that the iTunes store is experiencing a high volume of emails. I thank you for your patience.

As an Advisor for the iTunes Store, I handle issues related to billing, downloading, customer accounts, and the items available on the iTunes Store. Although your question falls outside of my area of specialty, I will be happy to assist you with resolving your issue.

I have verified that the iTunes Store is functioning and accepting connections. The issue could have been temporary, related to your internet connection, your local network, or your computer itself. "

Only serves as an indication that many of the internal staff are not informed - seems sad since it must waste a great deal of their time.

What I hope we all take away from this is anger towards Apple for not being forthcoming and letting us languish as they showed all systems green on their status page, just so they can have better uptime stats.

I hope we all take the time to contact Apple, and to complete any customer service satisfaction surveys, and use those opportunities to express our dissatisfaction not because the service when down, stuff happens, but for not being forthcoming. That is unforgivable.

Please don't any one beleive that Apple was ignorant of the situation. They knew as soon as Match had problems. These systems don't sit humming away in a closet somewhere with no supervision. At the very least their systems monitoring software was generating error messages and SMS messages to their techs immediately when the problem happened. Don't forget they showed a problem with iTunes (Match specifically) right from the start, but then they chose to change the status to working even though Match was not working properly, which left us all wondering if it was our machines.

And guess what I received from Apple yesterday. The invoice for my Match auto-renew. That stung. Obviously they pay more attention to keeping the servers that handle the billing running than they do to the ones that run Match.

Just wanted to confirm that itunes Match is working for me in Mexico. I did not do anything, other than open my iTunes app in Windows 7, and automatically checked all my songs with 4 "waiting" songs from which it matched 3 and uploaded 1.

I originally reported on August 7th, that the service was not working. I did not tried to do any of the "solutions" posted in the meantime. Just tried to let iTunes do its thing about 4-5 times since August 7th without any luck.

I hope this is a sign that everything is solved for everyone.

Regards,

Hi,

Itunes match is NOT working well in the UK. Since the problem was supposed to fixed last week I have been sucessfull in re-establishing connection several times before being in stuck in Step 1.

I though everything was working fine earlier today, downloaded some free tracks from Amazon which were added to Itune Match in the sort of time I expected - tracks uploaded OK.

An hour later I tried to another track - match got stuck in Step One.

I eventually signed out of Itunes store by changing from UK store to USA then back to UK store. Signed back into itunes store and activated match. Process completed successfully including the Upload of the recently added track. (By the way I done it this way as the last time there was a severe outage, this was the only for me to fix problem).

I am connected to Match but I am not confident that the next tracks will be matched or uploaded.

I am awaiting a response from Apple Support.

Jim

I'm with you re: "believe it when I see it".

Finally got an iTunes Match to run at start, ableit, very slowly. Will believe Match is working again if I get no error messages through-out the day and or tomorrow.

Just received a reply back from Apple after my demand for a pro-rate refund and explanation.

-----------------------------------------

Hi Richard,

Welcome to iTunes store customer support. My name is Umair and I am glad to help you today.

I understand that you have been unable to use iTunes Match as per your expectations. I know you must be eager to get this resolved and I am glad to help you.

Richard, you can usually resolve most issues with iTunes Match by turning the service off and back on. Follow these steps for your operating system:

- Mac OS X: hold down the Option key and choose Store > Turn Off iTunes Match. Then, go back to the same menu and choose Turn On iTunes Match.

- Windows: hold down the Shift key and choose Store > Turn Off iTunes Match. Then, go back to the same menu and choose Turn On iTunes Match.

- iOS device: tap Settings > Music > iTunes Match Off. Then, tap iTunes Match On.

If the issue continues, see this article:

iTunes Store: Troubleshooting iTunes Match

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4054

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any concerns. Thank you and have a nice day!

Sincerely,

Umair

iTunes Store Customer Support

http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/ww/

-------------------------------------

What a complete and utter waste of time!  I have sent another one back suggesting they re-read my original message, and then, after applying my pro-rata credit, reply to me with a full and frank explanation regarding this abortion of an expensive, not fit-for-purpose service!!  Pathetic!

I received word-for-word exactly the same stock reply, even though my message to Apple included a list of "solutions" I'd already tried, one of which was -- of course -- "turning the service off and back on."

I got the same canned response and the problem is, of course, still there. I now have had over 2000 imported songs sitting on "waiting" for almost a week now. Think any of us will be getting a prorated refund? lol

Is anyone else getting fed up with Apple's playing dumb and handing out generic troubleshooting info THAT THEY KNOW WON'T HELP DURING THIS SERVICE OUTAGE?

I received this from Apple Support, and I've included my reply.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

No Lester, I am not upset because iTunes Match is not working as it should. An outage is understandable. One waits patiently for it to pass.

I am upset because Apple didn't fess up the fact that you're having a serious outage. The outage continued long after your service status page showed it was working. That's misleading an led to a lot of people troubleshooting their own systems based on Apple's assertion that the service was working.

And what really upsets me more than anything else, is during this outage which Apple was fully aware of it's existence, the customer service people send out generic boiler plate troubleshooting tips LIKE WHAT YOU JUST SENT ME BELOW knowing full well this won't fix our problems. That's only adding one lie on top of another.

Is this what Apple wants to be known regarding customer service?

Greg

On Aug 12, 2013, at 10:30 AM, iTunes Store <iTunesStoreSupport@apple.com> wrote:

Hi Greg,

Thank you for contacting the iTunes Store Support. This is Lester and I'll be attending to your concern today.

I understand that you are having difficulty accessing iTunes Match. I know it can be frustrating when things aren't working the way you anticipated and I'm truly sorry for that. Let me provide you with a recommendation. 

You can usually resolve most issues with iTunes Match by turning the service off and back on. Follow these steps for your operating system:

- Mac OS X: hold down the Option key and choose Store > Turn Off iTunes Match. Then, go back to the same menu and choose Turn On iTunes Match.

- iOS device: tap Settings > Music > iTunes Match Off. Then, tap iTunes Match On.

If the issue continues, see this article:

iTunes Store: Troubleshooting iTunes Match

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4054

If you need further assistance, please reply to this email with more information about the issue you are experiencing with iTunes Match, including the complete text of any error message. Take care.

Sincerely,

Lester

iTunes Store/Mac App Store Customer Support

https://www.apple.com/support/itunes/ww/

Please Note: I work Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday 

                   7:00 AM - 6:00 PM CST

Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to assist you.

Same here - word for word, even after specifying that I'd already done just that. Infuriating…

I let it go last night and it did manage to upload about 100 songs, albeit absolutely gracially slow. It would still get stuck and restart the match process every 5-10 songs, but at least it wouldn't error out.

Today I added a single new song locally (no cloud uploads pending at this point). Match has been chewing on that one measly song for about an hour so far, but at least has not errored out so far. It seems to me Apple has improved performance just enough to avoid the connection timeouts. I guess this counts as progress. Kinda, sorta…

anyone buying this? That match had a multi day global outage and Apple didn't know about it? Do they want ids to think they're lying or stupid?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Hi Greg,

Thank you for writing us back. Please understand that we, at the iTunes Store Support, are not aware of an outage at this time regarding iTunes Match. Also, to help isolate the issue, we provide general troubleshooting steps when we do not have specifics as to what the customer is exactly experiencing.

I suggest that you provide me a screenshot of the issue you are experiencing including the complete text of any error message that will help me investigate the cause of the issue. Please trust that I will also consult a senior advisor to provide a more proper resolution compared to the general instructions I previously provided.

In Mac OS X, you can take a screenshot of your entire screen by holding down the Command and Shift keys and pressing 3 (Command-Shift-3). If you hold down Command-Shift-4, the cursor turns into a crosshair. You can select a portion of your screen to capture as a screenshot. The screenshots you take are saved to your desktop

iTunes Store iTunesStoreSupport@apple.com

After having troubles the whole weekend connecting to iTunes Match (it connected a few times, after more than 15mins waiting), it seems like the service is working now from Belgium. Unfortunately I still get some delays (around 10min) from time to time.

If it was an outage and Apple fails to admit it, we can only hope this won't happen on a regular basis.

But, if there was no outage, like they say, then it means that this is the level of quality Apple provides for the Match service which is just sad I really expected more.

Hmmm. It's possible that the customer-facing people weren't fully informed of the full nature of this, and so they might not be personally 'lying'. Still, I would assume that their technical ops people *must* have known about it (or their monitoring is inconceivably poor).

However you look at it, this denial of the scale of the problem on Apple's part is very unimpressive. Either their customer-facing support people are lying, or they weren't informed, or their technical ops people are incompetent. It paints a pretty shoddy picture either way.

Apple need to fess up now, I think. Outages happen, as do technical disruptions, but pretending that this did not occur, in the face of overwhelming comprehensive evidence is simply not good enough. Paying customers don't like being treated like that.

(And, as if to underline the issue, the service seems to be stuck again right now. Or at least it is for me. It was working just fine 10 hours ago.)