Pogue-praised Line2 is offline for the moment
The price of fame: earlier this week, David Pogue lavished Toktumi's VoIP app Line2 with a hearty helping of NYT love, saying that the $1 app (which requires a $15 monthly subscription) "has the potential to shake up an entire industry." We first mentioned the service back in February, and while Steve wasn't quite as enthusiastic as David P., he did acknowledge that it's a great tool for small businesses or heavy phone users.
As of last night, however, the Line2 service is temporarily offline and the app has been voluntarily pulled from the App Store; as Technologizer reports, the company's servers are being targeted by a DNS attack, and the service quality was degraded to the point where Toktumi execs felt that it was better to avoid a bad initial experience for new users while they resolved the problem. Toktumi is updating users via its Twitter feed as to the anticipated resolution.
Seeing an app summarily pulled from the App Store, or rejected on specious grounds, has certainly happened before in the VoIP, audio and telephony space (in fact, just this morning the developers of Snowtape let us know that they're struggling to get their app through approval), so it was understandable that reader Arnoldo was anxious when he sent in an email this morning about the outage. In this case, however, it's not Apple pulling the strings.
