After months of waiting, iOS 6.1 was released to consumers late last month. However, several issues that went unnoticed during the testing phase are now cropping up on upgraded devices, particularly involving connectivity, sending emails, texts and entering a network. The advice from carriers so far has been to hold off upgrading if possible, until Apple figures out a fix.
These issues, which for now seem to be primarily affecting users in Europe, have incised particularly on Microsoft Exchange support, which is coincidentally also used widely in many large organizations for storing email, calendar events and contacts. According to many system administrators, a huge spike in system logging has been verified since the release of iOS 6.1 last month, which suggests that the experience of many users attempting to connect to the network from their newly-upgraded devices has been far less than great.
Several European carriers have already issues strong warnings to their customers. Vodafone UK published a forum post over the weekend, and officially issued a statement on Monday, confirming “intermittent” connectivity flaws and urging users to stick with iOS 6 for now:
“While Apple’s investigations continue, we would recommend that anyone who has not yet installed iOS 6.1 on their iPhone 4S should delay doing so until Apple has confirmed that the problem has been fixed.”
3 Austria, another prominent phone carrier in Europe, made a similar warning over Facebook, urging users to hold off upgrading until all of the problems have been fully addressed. While the Cupertino company has not commented on this problem so far, it is believed to be related to the way iOS 6.1 handles calendar invites.
Even if you do not regularly use Microsoft Exchange, there is still a slight chance that you might be hit by these problems. Other connectivity problems such as sending texts and even getting into a 3G network seem to have cropped up, which would for sure be an annoyance to users. However, these problems seem to only happen intermittently and are not widespread.
While I have not personally experienced these issues myself, it would be expected for Apple to come clean on what is actually going on over the next few hours. Surely, a fix is well under way.
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