Blackberry Network is Down

Brian writes "According to CNET and others, "A system failure at Research In Motion has affected BlackBerry users in the Western Hemisphere, a news channel reported on its Web site late on Tuesday. The infrastructure failed on Tuesday night, and e-mails were not being delivered to the handheld devices.""

Comments

must resist Great Disturbance In The Force joke...

[ScentCone]

Because millions of voices really ARE crying out in pain. Man, the cooler we make things, and the more that entire business cultures get built around this stuff, the more fragile it is. Just think of the war stories we're going to hear about people who've come to utterly depends on their Crackberries having lost a deal, not heard that a critical server was down, not realized that a surgery had been rescheduled, and so on. I wouldn't make a living if people didn't depend on fancy networked technologies, but it sure does feel like a house of cards, some days.

Not very reassuring.

[Dan East]

A single point of failure can bring down the entire network? Not very reassuring, especially considering Blackberry is predominately a business tool.

Dan East

Re:Not very reassuring.

[lucabrasi999]

especially considering Blackberry is predominately a CRITICAL business tool.

Contrary to popular belief. E-mail is NOT a critical business tool. You don't believe me? Then compare e-mail with the following:

Supply Chain Systems? Critical.

Customer Order/Customer Relationship Systems? Critical.

Manufacturing systems? Critical.

Payroll? Absolutely the single MOST critical application at most enterprises (especially during pay runs).

But, e-mail is not critical. When I've been involved in storage meetings, e-mail is always a Tier Three application. In other words, while it is a useful tool, there are other ways of contacting people in an emergency. You know, like by telephone.

Re:Not very reassuring.

[lucabrasi999]

Wow, you must be one of the users that is freaking out over Blackberry today.

Supply chain is worthless if crm can't communicate with them, ditto for manufacturing, payroll is worthless if they can't communicate with accounting or HR.

Most of the systems I describe have a DR and/or failover capability because they are considered critical to the operations of the business. Personally, I have NEVER seen an e-mail system that has had DR or Failover. Beyond DR, ask an even more important question: In the event of disaster, how quickly does e-mail come back up on-line? Is it the first system recovered? Or are there 35 other systems that are recovered before e-mail? That should tell you how important e-mail is in comparison to your company's other systems.

Now, let's talk about using e-mail as an interface: Does the communication you describe have to occur via e-mail? I have been working in IT for 15 years and I have never seen a place that depends upon an e-mail to interface between any of the systems I described. For example, if I am running a Supply Chain system, I can keep the supply chain moving for hours without worrying about ANY e-mail communication with external systems. Well-designed Supply Chain systems use EDI (not e-mail) for communication. And, EDI is usually built with redundancy and DR capability If they don't use EDI, they depend upon someone manually entering the information into a screen, or even a flat file. If I absolutely MUST contact someone, I just call their phone. As for Payroll, payroll runs at even small companies are not dependent upon e-mail. The timekeeping systems interact with the Payroll systems via EDI or some sort of file transfer that is NOT dependent upon Exchange/Domino.

Hell, even if I am in hardware support and my e-mail server crashes, I should be smart enough to log directly into my messaging console to keep an eye on the status of my other servers. Most monitoring tools use e-mail to send messages to Operations. My operations department had better be able to log into their consoles to check the systems real-time and not be waiting for the e-mail system to recover.

Also note, for those things the phone is not an option, it must be in writing.

There are a few options here: If you are running a normal PO approval process, then there is always an expected time-lag in approvals. My manager cannot be expected to drop everything to approve my new business-card order system. And, if there is an emergency, well-designed systems have an override that allows for exceptions.

Try to keep in mind that many, many businesses do not reside in one office, or one building, or one postcode, or one country, before you make a silly comment like "e-mail is not critical".

Firstly, I work for a Fortune 500 company. We are spread all over the world.

Secondly, There is nothing silly about my statement. E-mail is NOT critical. People THINK it's critical because it is the system they have the most 'face-time' with. But, face-time is not equal to criticality. If your organization has built interfaces or business processes that depend upon someone approving something via e-mail, then you have a very poorly designed system. You can easily have interfaces move directly between systems without ANY human interaction. You can build custom web-pages to allow approvers the ability to make their approval directly in the purchasing system.

It IS a house of cards

[Opportunist]

Reason? It's cheaper than bricks.

Seriously, that's what's gonna break our neck sooner or later. We strip systems of their redundancies to make them cost less, we use cheaper components and the lowest bidder, we downgrade specs to the bare minimum because price makes right.

Technology already starts learning from nature, copying structures and models from millenia proven concepts. I think business could learn a thing from them too. Because nature has down what business wants to achive: Maximum output for minimum input. There is no such thing as waste and surplus in nature's makeup, if there was, it would be used for more output instead. So why do we have 2 kidneys, why is our brain able to adapt to damage, if it wasn't for the simple fact that this proved to be the more successful way in the long run.

But as long as companies are run by managers who care more about their next quarter report than the company itself, this won't fly.

For a communications company

[philo_enyce]

RIM is pretty bad at communicating with their end users. They do not have a network status page. When you call in to TSupport, there is no message indicating a general interruption in service. This is totally unacceptable. I spent two hours on hold last night after checking over a client's BES and not finding any issues locally. That hold time could have easily been reduced to a couple of minutes if RIM had a system in place to notify users of problems. Even Time Warner, which has terrible customer service, has service outage notices as part of the call tree when you call in for support. I would guess that this is a conscious choice on RIM's part, to try and appear as if they never have problems. Bad idea. Customer frustration sets in big time when you don't talk to them during outages.

RIM: Get better at communicating with your client base or they will go elsewhere.

philo