Apple's vocal mistress Siri had a brief time-out yesterday when the cloud-based service dispersed, leaving iPhone users to prod their screens like everyone else.

It's not clear what went wrong. Apple is being as fulsome as ever, but for a good few hours Americans were greeted with a connection error when asking Siri a question, and when she returned the only explanation she could offer was that she'd been at the spa.

That's according to Venturebeat, which noted the failure mid-afternoon, and that functionality was slowly returning later in the day. Not that many people use Siri, and even Apple calls her a "beta" application, so the outage didn't have a significant impact on users.

Siri has, so far, mostly been quizzed on her relationship with Hal 9000 (she won't discuss it), asked for stories (she has one to tell, if pushed) and deluged with requests for illegal drugs (she'll find nearby addiction treatments) and to open the pod-bay doors (greeted with a sigh).

Within the USA she can find businesses and link to maps, but elsewhere Siri really is limited to novelty functionality, but novelty alone has sold many an iPhone app – so why not Siri too? ®