Following the battery life issues in iOS 5, Apple has another situation on their hands with the national outage of the Siri personal assistant built into the iPhone 4S.
The service is currently unavailable and any attempts to use it for search or other tasks returns a server not available message. As the service requires a server-side connection to Apple’s dedicated server farm in order to complete requests, the outage means that the functionality is effectively rendered useless for the time being.
Apple has yet to officially address the issue, though it did state during the iPhone 4S introduction that Siri was being launched as a beta application.
Update: Siri is back up and running as of 6:15PM CST
