With a million new iPhones sold in the initial weekend, Apple reaps the rewards of a program that has produced the best mobile computing device of its time.

But as the media blizzard continued, I noticed a theme lurking beneath the event. The Internet has become so much a necessary commodity for businesspeople and consumers alike that any interruption in service is perceived as an outrage. Thus the aggravation as customers across the country found themselves unable to activate the devices that some of them had stood in line all night to buy. A problem with iTunes servers seems to have been the culprit.

A glitch like this is soon fixed, but ponder how far we've come.

In the early days of the Internet, when we still used twittering modems for dial-up access and the Web was amazing us by combining graphics with text, we almost came to expect that sites would often be balky or unavailable. Today, an outage can mean big problems, such as those that happened recently to Amazon, where an hour offline can result in a million-dollar loss. Or think about Google, which makes its pitch about online programs on the basis of reliability. What happens when you can't get to the document you need right now?

Last week a colleague sent me e-mail from China, where he was about to give a presentation. He had remembered a photo I had published on my Web site and asked for a copy to include in his remarks. Thinking once again how remarkable it was that the Web made it possible to do such things, I attached the needed image to my reply and hit Gmail's "send" button. Then I watched while the system chugged, hiccoughed and failed. Multiple tries finally succeeded.

As we work through such frustrations, be aware of this address: downforeveryoneorjustme.com. Use it and you'll at least be able to find out whether your connection is malfunctioning or the site you need is really offline.

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Is it just the heat of summer, or is the unavailable site just one of many recurrent frustrations that now seem worse?

I've never seen so much spam, and seem to get the Hallmark greeting card malware message 50 times a day. My mailbox is stuffed with Britney Spears news, incredible deals on bogus software and offers to help me improve various parts of my anatomy. The latest wrinkle seems to be the come-ons in foreign languages, which in the past three days have shown up in Russian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Portuguese and (I think) Romanian.

If you think all this stuff is harmless, consider McAfee's recent experiment.

The computer security specialists gave away 50 Dell laptops to people in 10 countries, the machines armed only with the basic McAfee antivirus software. The idea was to track phishing scams, where the intent is to get you to divulge financial details by sending you to fake Web addresses made up to look like real banks and other institutions. In one month of the test, the participants received 104,000 messages, which works out to about 70 per day.

With PCs now stuffed with spyware, the testers saw performance drop like a stone. And get this: Of the 104,000 letters, fewer than 24,000 were in English, so I seem to be on to something in observing that spam and malware scams are increasingly internationalized.

Linux or a Mac can sharply reduce the virus threat, but phishing scams have a life of their own and show up no matter what equipment you use. The only recourse is common sense and learning how to use a spam filter. Gmail's excellent filter is one reason I keep using the service.

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Where's the next generation of Web software going to come from?

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