AOL Corporate disables meeting management via iPhones due to Apple iOS 6.1 bug

AOL has informed its corporate employees that it has temporarily disabled the ability to manage meetings via mobile devices due to a bug with Apple’s iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch iOS 6.1 operating system. We received an internal email from a source detailing the announcement from AOL CIO Michael Freker.

Below is a statement from Freker to 9to5Mac that details the situation:

AOL’s corporate Enterprise Messaging Operations team has been monitoring a rapidly increasing and unusually large volume of traffic across our enterprise mail environment originating from iOS devices running the new iOS 6.1 update. We have researched this problem and appears to be connected to a recently identified issue that seems to cause these iOS devices to continuously loop while synchronizing a recurring calendar meeting invitation. Similar problems have been reported by a number of sources to several media outlets across the Web in the past few days. While our team continues to work productively and rapidly with Apple and Microsoft to resolve the issue, it has been necessary to temporarily disable the ability to accept or manage calendar meetings using mobile devices to ensure that we maintain the integrity of our corporate enterprise messaging platform. Since this change is limited to managing calendar invitations, by disabling them temporarily we allow our employees to continue to experience the excellent productivity these devices bring to our enterprise until this issue is resolved.

The iOS 6.1 bug causes a “continuous loop” when meetings are attempted to be managed. This leads to a degraded iOS device performance and battery life experience. AOL is working with Microsoft and Apple to resolve the issue.

Issues with iOS 6.1’s Exchange support has also been highlighted on Microsoft’s forums. “I had a user upgrade to 6.1 and immediately after he finished, his [iPhone/iPad] started causing excessive logging on the exchange server,” one of the postings reads. ZDNet also notes the issue with iOS 6.1 and Exchange servers.

Earlier this week, Apple seeded iOS 6.1.1 to registered developers. The iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch software update adds enhancements to Maps for Japan. It is unclear if that update fixes the enterprise-related issues. Earlier today, Vodafone informed customers that an iOS 6.1 bug can cause performance issues for iPhone 4S users.