Heh. I'm happy to let other people try this out - iCloud hasn't exactly had the best record for uptime and little things like this reinforce my worry that Apple doesn't do backend services well.
iCloud has better uptime than Amazon Web Services.
People bash Apple and iCloud and claim they can't do backend software, but they ignore that iTunes has been trooping for over a decade under tremendous load without a pickup. Contrast that with another store on the web- Amazon.com-- which was (at the time I worked for Amazon) generally partially down %40 of the time. (Though not all of it and it does a good job of faking it when it is down.)
Look at AWS where companies like Netflix and Heroku have had days of outages because the AWS network went down or whole datacenters were taken offline.
I've never seen that kind of an outage in iMessages or iCloud.
Apple just keeps trooping not making any noise because it's always working... but because Apple's business model is selling hardware, and people give Amazon a free pass for some reason (I mean why is AWS popular when it's down all the time while Google is rock solid with its hosting services yet less popular?)
iTunes is a specific Apple service, not a platform upon which 3rd party services run. It's one thing to run a product; it's another to run a platform. As a provisioner of PaaS, Apple are not seen as proven.
As for AWS, they're almost ubiquitous. Half the world seems to run on AWS. Regions go down time to time, but half the point of AWS is that it's a distributed architecture that allows apps running on that platform to stay up - usually. Extreme examples (such as dependent PaaS Heroku being taken down) are the edge cases that make it to the press.
It seems like you're only claiming Apple's services to have higher up times than Amazon's because you were able to look at Amazon's up times more closely. Who is to say that Apple's services don't also often have partial downtimes and "faking it when it is down?"
CloudKit JS: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...
CloudKit Web Services: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...
Edit: They've fixed the links.