Apple's iMessage service experiencing hiccups again

Apple's iMessage service is once again experiencing issues.

Users are reporting problems sending messages to other users, with Apple's built-in progress bar hanging in limbo.

Apple's latest support status update from 2:15 p.m. PT says that "some" users are affected, but does not go into further detail about the scale of the issue.

"We are investigating and will update the status as more information becomes available," the company said.

iMessage is Apple's proprietary messaging platform used between iOS devices, as well as Macs, replacing the need to use text messages on the former. The feature was added in iOS 5, and into Mac OS X in version 10.8 Mountain Lion.

This is the service's second stumble in recent weeks.An outage in mid-September left many users with the same message sending issues.

A number of Internet sites and service have experienced issues in the past 24 hours with the arrival of Hurricane Sandy in the East Coast of the U.S. New York City power companies intentionally shut off power to parts of their grids, taking some sites and backend services down with them. It's unclear if this is at all related.

We'll update this story when we know more.