Since iOS7 came out on the 18th of September, we’ve seen many clients with problems sending iMessage’s. What we’ve noticed is that you may not be aware that iMessage isn’t working, as you don’t seem to get the exclamation mark over the Messages icon like you did in iOS6 (not sure if that’s an issue, or a deliberate change by Apple at this stage). However, if you check in Messages you may see that some sent messages are still “Sending” or have a status of “Message Send Failure”.
There’s a couple of points to note:

  • Under iOS6, Messages reverted to SMS if the iMessage service was unavailable for whatever reason. Under iOS7, this has been switched off (you can turn it back on in Settings/Messages – Send as SMS) by default.
  • iMessage has had some minor issues over the past couple of days, but this should only have affected a minority of users.
  • There may be something else causing this that at this stage Apple are unaware of.

Our experience has been that turning the phone off fully and restarting kicks iMessage back into life (although you will have to go in and manually resend the messages that have failed). However, we have also some users who this procedure has not worked for. The solution for them has been a little more complex. This involves resetting all the network settings on your device, meaning that you will have to re-enter wifi passwords for any wireless networks you wish to join. It does, however, seem to resolve the problem now for those users who send a lot of messages, so use it at your discretion. If you find another solution, please leave a comment! I expect Apple will release an update in the coming weeks to resolve this issue properly for those who can wait, but as no admission of a problem has been forthcoming at this stage I can’t be sure when this likely to come.
For those who need to get iMessage working again now, here’s the process to reset all the network settings. You will need to know your iMessage id password and any wireless network security settings before continuing.

1. Turn off iMessage in Settings/Messages
2. Reset networking settings in Settings/General/Reset
3. Turn on iMessage in Settings/Messages