Siri Outage Affecting Many iPhone 4S Users

Apple's Siri technology from the record-selling iPhone 4S has been only intermittently available today for hundreds of people, and the twitter-verse predictably went a bit crazy. People began tweeting earlier today that the Siri voice recognition would launch, but it would not answer questions or perform its other functions. For Apple, the news will be most unwelcome, particularly because it's the second time in just a week that iPhone 4S has had more than just a minor hiccup.

Thousand of iPhone 4S users discovered their devices were draining their batteries much faster than they should have been. People took to the Web to try and devise a workaround, but Apple ultimately admitted there was a problem and that an iOS fix would come out soon. In the first month of iPhone 4S' existence, Siri has been one of the main selling points and a true highlight of Apple's latest must-have gizmo.

With recent news that Apple was no longer the U.S.' leading smartphone seller, the battery drain issue and now Siri's problems, Apple maybe getting nervous or simply enjoying the white-hot spotlight. Of course, some of these problems pale in comparison to news in October that Apple founder and iPhone inventor Steve Jobs had died. Jobs was known to only release a device when it was truly ready, presumably to avoid problems like the one Siri may be experiencing now.

Furthermore, voice recognition software has been around for many years, and it has always been problematic. Many times, the software just can't understand what people are saying, and although Siri has been criticized for not being able to filter out background noise sometimes, it has mostly been an overachiever.

Tell us in the comments if you have had a Siri outage.