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To compensate, the company is giving all current subscribers a free 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription.

"We want to apologise to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience," the company said in an email sent to subscribers.

Apple has also decided to amend its MobileMe marketing material, dropping the "Exchange for the rest of us" tagline and removing references to "push". That change follows criticisms that while data is pushed to mobile devices instantly, data from Macs and PCs is only synced to the MobileMe cloud every 15 minutes. Push will no longer be used, until that delay has been removed.

"So even though things are indeed instantly pushed to and from your iPhone and the web apps today, we are going to stop using the word 'push' until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too," the email explains.