BlackBerry Outages Across North America

TheHappyMailAdmin writes "BlackBerry service in North America is out: no email, no BB Messenger and no web browsing. Last carrier estimate I got was 24 hours until service will be restored, with others saying they've gotten estimates from support from between 3 hours to 2 days. BES and BIS services are impacted, and it's across all carriers. Bad timing for RIM as people are wrapping up their holiday shopping..." Updated 18:11 GMT by timothy: Reader notheusualsuspect pings with a note that the service has been restored.

Comments

Works for me

[jpyeron]

I did a test message from/to my BB too.

RTFA

* FINAL UPDATE: Things are back to normal. RIM Statment to follow. ...

Re:Works for me

[jpyeron]

Using: Verizon and BlackBerry Enterprise Server Version: 4.1.5.24

Re:Works for me

[MBGMorden]

Yeah - this skeered me (I'm the BES admin at work and sometimes it's hard to explain the difference to the powers that be that there's a difference between a failure that's our fault and a failure that's RIM's fault :)). My BB is working fine though.

Re:Works for me

[bsharitt]

Mine was out last night, but seem to have been working all morning for me. BIS and Sprint here.

Re:Works for me

[LOLLinux]

That's because this submission and the article are from yesterday when this was actually happening.

Re:Works for me

[multisync]

Mine is working too, and I received two messages at 3:00 AM.

Re:Works for me

[vishbar]

Same here. I got a flood of messages circa 3am EST

Re:Works for me

[ari_j]

It appears that, as always, Slashdot has the breaking news within minutes after it becomes outdated.

Re:Works for me

[Bigbutt]

Actually they get their new stories via their Blackberry's.

[John]

Re:Works for me

[WUNHJazz]

My blackberry (BIS) is working fine as well. Perhaps the issue was resolved sooner than expected.

Re:Works for me

[Runaway1956]

Was the cause of the outage connected with that Bing update? ROFLAMO, that would be funny as anything!!

Re:Works for me

[erroneus]

It sometimes helps to explain to the powers that be with a data flow and connectivity diagram. All Blackberry traffic, especially BES traffic, flows through the Blackberry servers. So the phones are connected first to the carrier, then to the Blackberry servers, then to the BES, then to the company mail server. The company mail server is connected to the BES, which then connects to the Blackberry server network, then to the carrier, then to your phone.

There are pluses and minuses to this arrangement. The big minus is obvious -- when Blackberry has problems, EVERYONE has problems.

Perhaps the outage was shorter than expected. Slashdot news is never "real time" and problems are often solved before the story is ever published here.

Re:Works for me

[IorDMUX]

I lost all data-related connections as of about 3:00 PM, yesterday, on my Verizon BB Storm. As of this morning, the internet is back, but e-mail is still down.

I called Verizon's tech support yesterday and the rep said that they were flooded with calls from Blackberry users all asking the same questions, so I am pretty certain that this was, in the words of Ron Burgundy, "kind of a big deal". The worst part is that this is the second such outage in a week! It is starting to look as though Gmail has better uptime than BIS.

And no, before you ask, Bing has not mysteriously appeared on my phone. The default search provider is and always has been Google.

Re:Works for me

[Anonymous Coward]

[Sigs belongs in the fucking sig line]

Re:Works for me

[Bigbutt]

The wind is in the buffalo.

[John]

Re:Works for me

[Anonymous Coward]

via their Blackberry's what ?

Re:Works for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Widespread outages and delays started early yesterday afternoon GMT-5 as far as I have read. Our BES traffic here in the Cincinnati area was on a 5-10 minute delay from around 4PM - 7:30PM when pretty much all data services died (could still MMS and make phone calls, but no browsing/web apps, BBM, BES, BIS, etc.).

We support devices with Cincinnati Bell, Verizon, and T-Mobile as the carrier and all of them were displaying the same behavior.

Mail started flowing again around 2:30AM ET this morning for us.

So when is Google going to get their shit together and patch in a reliable and full featured ActiveSync client for Android that supports remote wipes and on-device encryption?

Re:Works for me

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worth noting, though, that many BlackBerrys have what's called "WAP Browsing," which allows you to browse directly to the Internet rather than via the BlackBerry service. I think the downside to this is that web pages are not as nicely compressed as when you connect to the BIS service, but on 3G networks (or even EDGE, really) that's less of an issue these days. During the outage I was able to WAP browse on my BlackBerry.

Re:Works for me

[Random BedHead Ed]

Actually they get their new stories via their Blackberry's.

via their Blackberry's what ?

Maybe he died while he was dictating his post from the Castle Aaaaaaagggg.

Re:Works for me

[mrdogi]

Actually they get their new stories via their Blackberry's.

Their Blackberry's what? Enquiring minds want to know...

Can you hear me now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bing.

Re:Can you hear me now?

[Yvan256]

Phil: Ned Ryerson?

Re:Can you hear me now?

[Sanat]

My favorite movie of all time.

And just like Ground Hog Day... Blackberry service failure is going to occur over.. and over.. and over

Re:Can you hear me now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bing, again. You got insurance?

Central point of failure..

[NeuralAbyss]

RIM seems to be particularly odd in chosing an architecture that gives a single point of failure.

Then again, given most crackberry users.. nothing of value was lost.

Re:Central point of failure..

[ircmaxell]

I think it's weird requiring all services to go through a middle man. Why should I need to use a proxy for push email when my exchange server supports it directly? (If there's a real reason, please tell me because I'm curious)...

PS. I'm a proud owner of a Droid. Push email works quite well for me on it (directly from my server). I don't see a reason (for me) to switch to Blackberry/RIM). Is there a killer feature/functionality that a BB would give me over the Droid? Is it enough of a reason to add another point of failure in the stack?

Thanks...

Re:Central point of failure..

[netsavior]

BB is essential for cwhoreporate systems, because NO OTHER PHONE ON THE MARKET ANYWHERE matches its functionality... they can issue you a phone, then enforce strong passwords, content filtering, disable cameras so you don't end up sending pictures of your Christmas party indiscretion to your whole team, etc etc. Hell I can see my internal websites (not published to the internets) on my BB because it is basically VPN'd 24x7 to my work network.

In short, if you use your phone for email and dicking around, then the BB is one of the worst smartphones for you... if you are a corporate entity that wants to have certain employees "connected" at all times, then there is no other choice. The only confusing part to me is why people buy themselves a non-corporate blackberry.

Re:Central point of failure..

[emilyridesabmx]

The main reason I keep my Blackberry is the Pin/Blackberry messaging feature. You can contact anyone else with a Blackberry for free, anywhere you are. I travel a lot for work, to multiple countries, and the messenger feature is essential for staying in touch with the people I work with, scheduling,sharing documents and calendars. Even when I can't get a decent enough signal to push email, I can send pins. I think that's the one feature that makes it indispensable for some people.

Re:Central point of failure..

[RFGuy1]

Hello? Hello? Allan Angus is that you? Seems to me WebLink Wireless had a single point of failure as well! GJ

Re:Central point of failure..

[rickb928]

"The only confusing part to me is why people buy themselves a non-corporate blackberry."

Because, as you implied in your post, BlackBerry phones 'just work'. Most of the time.

Push e-mail? A BIS phone works splendidly. BIS handles the actual polling. Even OWA seems to work fo those of us without BB servers at the home office. Ask your favorite Android user how their POP/IMAP email is working. Full disclosure; I am an Android user, G-1 on Donut. iPhone users, I have no idea how you POP mail works, but it can't be too bad or you all would have ditched... wait, nevermind.

Web browsing? Very well done, considering the platform, since your BES is essentially a proxy server that solves some problems and gives you an enhanced experience. BIS does this also, just not as customizable as having a BES of your own.

BIS is a good idea, though it does expose the single-point-of-failure issue. But, consider your cell service in general:

- Most of us forget that the first single-point-of-failure is probably a cell tower. Yep, you might have two or three that can serve you, but if the backhaul from your tower is fritzed, you might have to wait until you get paroled from that tower, and move one to one that isn't hosed.

- The next single-point-of-failure is probably a metro area uplink for your carrier. I don't know for sure, but I suspect redundancy here is not universal.

- God forbid your carrier is architected like T-Mobile, or your single-point-of-failure is either a GSM service that has to be responsive or your phone is doing rock imitations, or a similar CDMA. I hear CDMA doesn't have the same architecture, but if your carrier can't authenticate you to the network, u b hosed.

RIM has had more than its share of outages over the last two years, but they have been notable because of the popularity of the platform. I ditched my BB to try Android. My wife has not been affected by either outage this month - be they natiowide or global or whatever. Her BB Curve hasn't missed a beat. Lucky I guess. And she would not like my G1, or Andriod, at all. Too much fuss. She just wants mail and minimal web when she wants it.

Dump on RIM if you want, but their platform works very well. Outages aside, it is a superior corporate solution, and makes most other platforms look like pants. Wait, are there ANY other corporate platforms?

Re:Central point of failure..

[dnaumov]

BB is essential for cwhoreporate systems, because NO OTHER PHONE ON THE MARKET ANYWHERE matches its functionality... they can issue you a phone, then enforce strong passwords, content filtering, disable cameras so you don't end up sending pictures of your Christmas party indiscretion to your whole team, etc etc. Hell I can see my internal websites (not published to the internets) on my BB because it is basically VPN'd 24x7 to my work network.

Please, don't spread misinformation. Corporate policy management (which includes EVERYTHING you have listed and a lot of other things) has been available for Nokia phones for a long long time.

Re:Central point of failure..

[javilon]

if you are a corporate entity that wants to have certain employees "connected" at all times, then there is no other choice. The only confusing part to me is why people buy themselves a non-corporate blackberry.

I agree with you, and that means the dead of Blackberry.

When people sees it, it looks like a phone, so they assume that they can do the things people do with a phone usually. Shortly after, they find out that this is only useful for work. It means that they are available to their bosses 24x7 and they get none of the fancy gadgets that iphone and Android users have installed on their phones.

When they realize that they would like to have another phone for personal use, they hate the blackberry and resist having one as much as possible.

On the other hand, you have the iphone and Android. People buy them and take them to work. They manage to force the IT department to write stuff for them. There are lots of security issues, but that is what users want.

Now, which one of the two has more future in small/medium companies right now?

And do you think that Blackberry will be able to live if only big enterprises use its terminals?

Re:Central point of failure..

[Dystopian Rebel]

crackberry users.. nothing of value was lost

However, the rest of us really do have to fear what Crackberry users suffering from withdrawal will do with their SUPER THUMBS.

Re:Central point of failure..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a "non-corporate blackberry" owner, and I can't be happier with my BB Bold. Sound quality is great compared to most other cell phones I have had. The features I use (and not corporate emai) is plenty for me. I don't need the million apps like iPhone users pee in the pants over. OMG. A Lightsaber! Seriously? It's just a smart phone. OK, I might be flamebait here, but just because YOU don't see a use for it, doesn't mean it isn't worth it for others.

Re:Central point of failure..

[nine-times]

I don't know about disabling cameras, but iPhones and Windows phones should be able to enforce strong passwords and use VPN.

Re:Central point of failure..

[Anonymous Coward]

so whats prevent me from having an android/maemo/insert-new-phone-here which vpn isnt on "24/7" exactly? right, nothing

Re:Central point of failure..

[Anonymous Coward]

BIS users dont typically use their own server but use a "free" as in beer internet service like Google or Yahoo.

My Blackberry just pushed me 2 hotel reservations for the Holidays so all is not down completely.

Re:Central point of failure..

[alen]

as it was already said a lot of government agencies and contractors rely on RIM. as well as any company that wants secure mobile email. the traffic is encrypted and it's a VPN from your phone to your email server. and all the internet traffic from the phone flows through your organization's network where it can be filtered and managed. Intranet access is easy with blackberries as well without opening up ports on the firewall or putting internal website IP's on public DNS servers.

I have an iphone 3GS as well and it doesn't match the security or manageability of Blackberry Enterprise Server. You can buy extra products but it's easier to just use RIM's service if you need this functionality

Re:Central point of failure..

[gregarican]

As well as the iPhone. I have a handful of corporate iPhone users and can remotely wipe their phones to a clean install from an admin console on our Exchange Server.

Re:Central point of failure..

[mu51c10rd]

they can issue you a phone, then enforce strong passwords, content filtering, disable cameras so you don't end up sending pictures of your Christmas party indiscretion to your whole team, etc etc. Hell I can see my internal websites (not published to the internets) on my BB because it is basically VPN'd 24x7 to my work network.

As an FYI, Exchange 2010 can enforce those items on mobile devices via ActiveSync policies. Also, you can vpn with other phones. I used to use a BB Curve with Rove Mobile for admin tasks, but have since switched to an Android phone with a vpn client. I would not switch back, but saying BB have more functionality is no longer true. I think RIM failed to keep up with their competitors, which is unfortunate as they seemed to have really brought the smartphone into the workplace.

Re:Central point of failure..

[th3_ev1l_m0nk3y]

Not true at all. Microsoft's System Center Mobile Device manager does everything you listed. You could argue that the BES does it better or that the BB devices are superior to Windows Mobile devices but the fact remains the same ability to control and lock down devices as well as provide behind the firewall access is there. That said, I would say the majority of corporations using smartphones are doing so purely for email and have no desire to provide behind the firewall access nor want to lock down devices to the extent where the camera is disabled. In those cases, the company is crazy to spend the money deploying BES when any device that supports activesync can be used natively with Exchange without the need for any addidtional hardware or software.You can even use BB devices with third party software on the device that adds activesync support for a whole lot less than deploying BES.

Re:Central point of failure..

[Kamokazi]

That's technically correct...however Windows Mobile allows for many of the same security options (strong PW, disable camera), but not all. Generally you can lock them down to about the same extent, but you have more granular control over the BB security options. So it depends on what the specific security needs are. I support both a BES and WM devices on Exchange, and managing the WM devices (server side, at least) is a much more pleasant experiences. Working with a BES can be frustrating at times, to say the least. WebOS, iPhone OS, and Android will also adopt some of the security restrictions in the EAS policy.

And I have recommended BB's for people who just want to e-mail. Out of the smartphones available, they are probably the simplest to learn option to just accomplish basic e-mail and text messaging, especially for older non-computer types...they seem to fumble with touch screens a bit. But overall as smartphones, they are definitely lacking.

Re:Central point of failure..

[Alioth]

IMAP email (actually, IMAPS) works perfectly on my iPhone. I also have authenticated SMTP over SSL for sending - I've not had a problem with either. (I also prefer my email to be pull only - email should be something I can poll when I have time, not something that goes ping every time something arrives, so push email is a "meh" feature for me).

Re:Central point of failure..

[nxtw]

iPhone users, I have no idea how you POP mail works, but it can't be too bad or you all would have ditched... wait, nevermind.

Who uses POP/IMAP when there's ActiveSync?

Re:Central point of failure..

[Anonymous Coward]

As an interesting side effect, my company gives all primary/secondary on-call folks BB's. They in turn automatically get messaged whenever some process starts failing. This lead to an interesting find last night when our on-call Oracle DBA called in wanting to know why he wasn't getting any BB messages as he found one of our Auth DB's ran out of space and was failing to allow for account changes (passwd changes, account updates, etc) and he never got a message about it. This type of thing is wide spread across the entire company, everyones little app/process/product emails home to their respective BB carrying owners, as well as a laundry list of middle and upper management, and like I said the on-call folks. It seems that our company overly relied on the use of BB when it should have been obvious to also CC these emails to our local NOC in the case of an unthinkable nationwide BB outage. -Anon with good reason.

Re:Central point of failure..

[nine-times]

iPhone users, I have no idea how you POP mail works

Works fine.

your BES is essentially a proxy server that solves some problems and gives you an enhanced experience.

What problems? What enhancements? I can browse the Internet on my phone pretty well without any proxy.

Most of us forget that the first single-point-of-failure is probably a cell tower....The next single-point-of-failure is probably a metro area uplink for your carrier....

Yes, there are other points of failure, but that's not really the issue. There are always going to be single-points-of-failure, but you try to minimize the number of them. To add another one unnecessarily is foolish.

Re:Central point of failure..

[Anonymous Coward]

Should have mentioned something else I found particularly funny. When our NOC found out about the BB outage last night, they sent an email to the BB users to inform them of this (which of course they weren't getting email).

Re:Central point of failure..

[PaisteUser]

BB is essential for cwhoreporate systems, because NO OTHER PHONE ON THE MARKET ANYWHERE matches its functionality... they can issue you a phone, then enforce strong passwords, content filtering, disable cameras so you don't end up sending pictures of your Christmas party indiscretion to your whole team, etc etc.

In Exchange 2007 you have the same functionality for policy enforcement; disabling cameras, strong passwords, managing applications, and blocking web browsing. Granted this is on a device that fully licenses ActiveSync technology.

Re:Central point of failure..

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's weird requiring all services to go through a middle man. Why should I need to use a proxy for push email when my exchange server supports it directly? (If there's a real reason, please tell me because I'm curious)...

Because Exchange DOES not push - it's a fake. The phone makes a pull request, and if there is nothing new, the server doesn't respond. If something arrives to go to the handheld, the server uses the existing connection and answers the pull. Works reasonably well provided your tcp connections don't time out. But if the phone isn't pulling there is no "push".

Blackebrry remains the only real push mobile solution out there. Not everyone needs it, but some of us do.

Re:Central point of failure..

[HikingStick]

The first generation Android phones were effectively bricks for most POP mail other than Gmail, and seemed to particularly hate Exchange/OWA. Newer releases play nice with POP and work well with Exchange/OWA. Third parties introduced apps to get G1s working with POP and Exchange, but not before some of us had major headaches with execs who wanted the newest toys. Not having full POP and Exchange support from the start was a huge strategic error. Luckily for them, most consumers have short memories once their eyes see a shiny new toy.

Re:Central point of failure..

[MightyMartian]

Indeed. I've always felt that Blackberry had an unnecessarily complex system. Push email just seems rather silly to me, considering we have protocols like IMAP which give full folder support and server synchronization "out of the box", are well tested and easily understood, and are available for pretty much every major mail server made in the last decade.

Re:Central point of failure..

[hazydave]

CDMA does soft handoffs for all protocols. So you can actually be on three cells at once, though only one is doing the uphaul. One would imagine this allowa for graceful failover if your uplink gets hosed, but who knows for sure. UMTS is supposedly doing some form of soft handoff, too. Don't know the details.

Re:Central point of failure..

[StikyPad]

Regardless, push e-mail works on the iPhone for any accounts residing on or emulating an Exchange server, which includes 90% of business e-mail servers, as well as GMail.

The downside is that you can only have one Exchange account. I suspect this will be addressed at some point, but you never know with Apple.

Re:Central point of failure..

[SBrach]

But in most cases the pushed email arrives much later on a blackberry compared to a WM phone with active sync. With active sync the phone polls the server directly. With BES the server pushes the e-mail to the phone through numerous middle men.

Re:Central point of failure..

[rickb928]

What newer release? Can you actually delete POP emails, empty the trash, and have them gone? Does Yahoo Mail work or do you need a premium account?

I still see reports from Google Codesite issue #1507 for every Android platform I am aware of that is in release. No fixes for these errors, and no reports of magical resolution for typical IMAP sync errors.

Re:Central point of failure..

[rickb928]

"What problems? What enhancements? I can browse the Internet on my phone pretty well without any proxy."

Apparently, you do NOT have a BB.

And for what it's worth, I had to set my user agent to a desktop version to get iGoogle to display properly on my G1. Safari handles that fine, if you make a change, I believe, but Google messed with iGoogle pages 8-9 months ago and tried to jack up phone browsers with mobile-enhanced pages (that means 'minimal' for you RAZR users out there).

But many phone browsers are just not as capable as an iPhone or Android, like RIM's browsers for instance. The BIS proxy helps with this, especially with Javascript. I dunno about Flash, since Adobe can't make it work on Android 1.0, 1.1, 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, and 2.1. Some phones have it slammed in there by the carrier, and Cyanogen I think now has that in the base ROM he puts out. I will root my phone soon to get that and waste even more bandwidth.

Re:Central point of failure..

[HikingStick]

I can't address your specific issues. All I know is that our SVP recently got an Android device (from T-Mobile), and he had me configure it for numerous mail accounts--a Gmail account, his ISP POP account, and our corporate Exchange account (Exchange 2007, with OWA). Apart from the initial configuration, I've not had to spend any time addressing issues regarding the email services. The user has had no problems to report.

Re:Central point of failure..

[mrdoogee]

Same here. My wife and I both have Blackberrys (Blackberries?) and we use the Blackbery messenger service almost exclusively. Its realtime, so no lag like SMS, and it gets things done faster then a voice call would.

That being said, I'd much rather have an Android phone. A Blackberry is a great communication tool, but as an entertainment device, it blows.

Re:Central point of failure..

[Sandbags]

Yes, in fact, the ONLY phone platform currently certified that meets all of the DISA STIGs for corporate device security is actually Windows Mobile 6.5.

Even with all it's remote management, a BES server and blackberry phone isn't up to government snuff. Obama has exceptions in place for his own (including restrictions on what he can use it for).

The iPhone is currently pending the same status, and with a minor software update and an Exchange server, it would meet 100% of the STIG, without requireing seperate 3rd party servers as even Win mobile does (and also would not require the named-in-the-STIG 3rd party client license to install on the phone costing $49 each).

Re:Central point of failure..

[Sandbags]

We have 15,000 exchange users. over 35% use an iPhone to access it. the iPhone is not a corporate supproted or subsidized device either, so there are all PERSONAL phones in addition to the one handed out by the company... Due to it's populatirt, the level of control the Exchange admins have over it, and the fact it requires no 3rd party serevrs or software beyond the Exchange clusters themselves, odds are we're switching the corporate contract from Sprint to AT&T as soon as the current one runs out in May (especially since about 80% of our executives are currently sporting an iPhone).

Re:Central point of failure..

[ircmaxell]

I can attest that Android does well also (Motorola Droid, Android 2.0.1)... Most times that I get an email while at work, my phone will alert before outlook even gets the message...

Re:Central point of failure..

[lewiscr]

And do you think that Blackberry will be able to live if only big enterprises use its terminals?

Ask IBM.

Re:Central point of failure..

[maztuhblastah]

IMAP email (actually, IMAPS) works perfectly on my iPhone.

And S/MIME support?

It might not matter to you or to most home users/teens/hipsters/iPhone users, but S/MIME is damn crucial for a lot of government and enterprise users. The iPhone doesn't support S/MIME, nor does Android, nor does Symbian. There're no third party mail apps for the iPhone (since Apple doesn't allow "duplication of functionality"), and none (that I know of) that provide S/MIME for Android, and definitely none for S/MIME on Symbian (I know because I checked last year when I was forced to use a Symbian phone.)

S/MIME support, along with management of the associated certs, etc. is one thing that BlackBerrys excel at and, like it or not, a reason that a lot of users choose them.

Re:Central point of failure..

[maztuhblastah]

Corporate policy management (which includes EVERYTHING you have listed and a lot of other things) has been available for Nokia phones for a long long time

Other than S/MIME support and key management, which is completely non-existent on Symbian.

Re:Central point of failure..

[MrCrassic]

BB is essential for cwhoreporate systems, because NO OTHER PHONE ON THE MARKET ANYWHERE matches its functionality

Actually, several companies are already planning mass-scale iPhone deployments because it matches most of its core functionality with appropriate security policies. (Tasks support is still missing, but EAS supports it and Apple is hopefully working on bridging that gap.)

However, it's still the most secure Exchange-capable mobile device available, and it's going to be a LONG time before high-security environments consider anything else...

Re:Central point of failure..

[Anonymous Coward]

As well as the iPhone. I have a handful of corporate iPhone users and can remotely wipe their phones to a clean install from an admin console on our Exchange Server.

Not to the same level as BBs (at this point in time):

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/06/iphonesecurity/
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/07/23/iphone-security-broken-business-users-take-note/

While not everyone needs that level of assurance, for those that do, RIM has gone through the effort of getting FIPS and other certifications:

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/ataglance/security/certifications.jsp

Re:Central point of failure..

[rickb928]

I know of at least 4 towers in the Phoenix area that do not hand off gracefully at least 80% of the time during peak periods. Probably a capacity issue with neighboring towers. UMTS here has interesting moments when it fails to EDGE, sometimes for days. Caling CS is pointless, it never gets escalated before it is fixed.

Re:Central point of failure..

[Anonymous Coward]

When people sees it, it looks like a phone, so they assume that they can do the things people do with a phone usually.

Don't let ignorance get in the way of your +5 mod... BlackBerries have been able to do everything phones can do since the 7000 series was launched. (They had integrated phones since the 62/6500s but they weren't very good).

Shortly after, they find out that this is only useful for work. It means that they are available to their bosses 24x7

Employers have had home phone numbers and mobile phone numbers for their employees since as long as people have had phones. Don't want to be in touch 24x7? Don't pick up the phone.

and they get none of the fancy gadgets that iphone and Android users have installed on their phones.

Third-party BlackBerry apps had been available for years before the first iPhone was launched. They just weren't promoted as heavily as they should have been and they were mostly business-oriented apps. Was BlackBerry a worse platform than iPhone because it didn't have iFarts?

And do you think that Blackberry will be able to live if only big enterprises use its terminals?

Yes.

Re:Central point of failure..

[Glendale2x]

- Most of us forget that the first single-point-of-failure is probably a cell tower. Yep, you might have two or three that can serve you, but if the backhaul from your tower is fritzed, you might have to wait until you get paroled from that tower, and move one to one that isn't hosed.

- The next single-point-of-failure is probably a metro area uplink for your carrier. I don't know for sure, but I suspect redundancy here is not universal.

- God forbid your carrier is architected like T-Mobile, or your single-point-of-failure is either a GSM service that has to be responsive or your phone is doing rock imitations, or a similar CDMA. I hear CDMA doesn't have the same architecture, but if your carrier can't authenticate you to the network, u b hosed.

In practice, all three of these happen far less frequently than RIM has outages.

Re:Central point of failure..

[Anonymous Coward]

Big reason why the iPhone will never replace the Blackberry as a business device in most areas of the world? You can't use it with gloves on.
 
    The core idea behind a business-use smart phone is the ability to act as a mobile office when you're out talking to clients, customers, travelling, etc. Around here, you need gloves a quarter of the year, which is a significant amount of time to be fumbling with taking on and off your gloves to simply answer a phone call.
 
I have an Android (G2/HTC Magic) phone myself (but not for business use) and the thing has rarely left my pocket while outside in the last month.

Re:Central point of failure..

[ToasterMonkey]

This type of thing is wide spread across the entire company, everyones little app/process/product emails home to their respective BB carrying owners, as well as a laundry list of middle and upper management, and like I said the on-call folks. It seems that our company overly relied on the use of BB when it should have been obvious to also CC these emails to our local NOC in the case of an unthinkable nationwide BB outage. -Anon with good reason.

Just be glad you have a NOC to make use of. Some of us have to sleepily respond to "pages" from small/mid sized OLTP systems (non-mainframe) ) on corporate BB's, praying service is/is not available some nights depending on if a code release recently happened. I bet you have an enterprise backup system too, lucky dog.

Re:Central point of failure..

[WillSDCA]

I have 3 accounts setup with Exchange Push on my iPhone and they all work fine. Two gmail accounts and my work email from our Exchange server.

Re:Central point of failure..

[kimvette]

My iPhone can connect to exchange, gmail, yahoo, aol, standard imap or pop and smtp, My email push updates depend on only having a data connection, and having my iPhone charged up.

I'm an adult. I can control what I view on Safari during the day. It's called personal responsibility, or more specifically, self control. Content filtering is unnecessary.

Strong passwords? That is enforced by server policies on Linux, on the groupware service, and by Windows.

VPN? Internal web sites? the iPhone comes with VPN, allowing me to connect to the office whenever required. 24x7 if desired.

Regarding cameras and indiscretions: again, I'm an adult. Personal responsibility. Self control.

Re:Central point of failure..

[kimvette]

But, if RIM didn't offer those services, how could they nickel and dime customers?

Re:Central point of failure..

[socsoc]

That's like me saying I don't understand why you use Exchange when you could use something free, like Zimbra, that also supports push. Everyone has reasons for what they've chosen to use and none of us know the whole picture unless we are directly involved in the decision making.

Re:Central point of failure..

[netsavior]

personal responsibility and self control are not something most large corporations (i.e. many users and many dollars) can afford to rely on.
If you drop your iPhone in a bar, could somebody get sensitive FTC regulated data off of it, could they do it before you realized it was gone? My BB is encrypted and locked with a strong password... Sure they could break it, but probably not in time to beat the wipe. Unless they were serious industrial espionage and decided to brute force it in a cellular deadzone.

If your bank said "Sure, we trust our tellers not to pocket the money, so at the end of the day they just log on to yahoo mail and email us how much money we should have in our cash drawer" you would find a new bank.

I am not saying you can't do some of that stuff on other phones, I am just saying that corporations, who are legally required to care about security and control, have no real choice in the matter... for now.

Re:Central point of failure..

[netsavior]

I could do that with an android phone, YOU could do it with an android phone... but can Johnny CEO? Some of my business users don't know what a VPN is, but they opened the package that their BB came in (straight from the carrier) and then immediately used it to look at live sales data on an intranet site... I am just saying; there is power there that is not shaking any time soon, and that power is based on the same limited functionality base that gets criticized by us techies.

Re:Central point of failure..

[misnohmer]

You missed a huge one, BATTERY LIFE. Blackberries are some of the best optimized phones for battery life. They do a lot of things behind the curtains to save power - maybe it's RIM's heritage of pager design, where a pager had to last a month on a single AAA battery. I am a moderate to heavy user and can get 2 to 3 days of life out of my curve. My wife uses it for personal email, SMS and IM and gets up to 5 days between charges. I used to regularly measure power usage of all kinds of smartphones in a fixed lab environment and have to tell you, it doesn't get much better than a blackberry. This includes power spent per email synchronized. Sadly, noone out there does any such measurements for public consumption - all cell phones are still marketed with the outdated and almost completely useless standby time and talk time. If you want to see how meaningless those are, consider the fact that iPhone is rated for up to 300hrs standby time (as per Apple website) - when was the last time you saw an iPhone last 12 days before needing a charge?

Re:Central point of failure..

[ircmaxell]

Actually, it's quite different. Exchange and Zimbra are, for all practical purposes, equivalent systems. They both act as an MTA. They both can run on one server. They both offer support contracts. They both support push notifications and so on. The significant differences are minimum cost (Since you can download one for free, and the other you cannot) and open vs closed (There are others I know, but these should suffice for the purposes of this discussion)...

The point I was making, is that the Android Push/WinMo Active Sync/Iphone Push solutions are fundamentally different from the RIM architecture in that all services that the BB uses are pushed through a proxy server first. My question was if there is a significant reason behind the proxy server (which, judging from the replies, there looks to be) enough to justify that added layer of complexity/failure point (Other than as a revenue generating service)... I fully understand that everyone has reasons for their choices. I honestly wanted to know what those reasons were (I didn't understand the benefits of the choice, so how could I understand its purpose?). After reading the answers, I don't think I need that service, but I can fully understand why so many businesses use them...

Re:Central point of failure..

[jasonjacks0n]

There're no third party mail apps for the iPhone (since Apple doesn't allow "duplication of functionality")

Actually, there are 3rd-party mail apps for iPhone, e.g. AltaMail, which I use. There are probably others too, though I have no idea whether any of them support S/MIME.

Your basic point stands, of course - I just wanted to point out that whatever official reasons it gives for App-Store rejections, Apple only "plays rough" with apps submissions when it feels like they challenge its core business, not merely because they duplicate Apple-provided functionality.

Re:Central point of failure..

[profplump]

The proxy is often handy. For one thing, it lets you move from WiFi to cellular to alternate carrier cellular without changing your public-facing IP address -- you can keep TCP connections open as you move around. It's also handy if you have non-public resources and can put the proxy inside the firewall.

Plus it ensures that everything is encrypted between you and some host you control (or at least trust), which is useful if you're doing things like using free WiFi, or if you don't trust the local cellular network security.

And on recent BBs you can setup automatically activated/deactivated VoIP, so you can use the phone even when you're on WiFi-only coverage. That bit necessarily requires some remote proxy that can pickup your calls from the PSTN and route them to your handset.

It's nothing you *need*, but it can be handy. It would be about 14 times handier if you could run your own personal proxy without paying RIM thousands of dollars or being integrated into their network, but it's still not a bad plan even in the existing state.

Re:Central point of failure..

[SlashDev]

Well for one, proxy servers are what they are, proxies. Meaning if BB were to change their server IPs or network architecture, you shouldn't be affected. Proxies are also used to 'hide' real equipment behind them, for security reasons mainly. Proxies can also do content filtering as well as man other tasks that application specific servers wouldn't be able to, either for resource saving or platform restrictions.

Re:Central point of failure..

[SlashDev]

Can Droid sync with an Exchange server? Just curious...

Re:Central point of failure..

[NovaHorizon]

"The only confusing part to me is why people buy themselves a non-corporate blackberry."

Because, as you implied in your post, BlackBerry phones 'just work'. Most of the time.

Push e-mail? A BIS phone works splendidly. BIS handles the actual polling. Even OWA seems to work fo those of us without BB servers at the home office. Ask your favorite Android user how their POP/IMAP email is working.

All other phones work the same as far as polling goes except the BB uses less battery power for it since the server polls. it's still around 15 minutes between polls. And don't forget that RIM pays a lot of money to have full access to yahoo email without the customer paying more to yahoo for access to the mail servers.

 

God forbid your carrier is architected like T-Mobile, or your single-point-of-failure is either a GSM service that has to be responsive or your phone is doing rock imitations, or a similar CDMA. I hear CDMA doesn't have the same architecture, but if your carrier can't authenticate you to the network, u b hosed.

I don't know about the other CDMA carriers, but at least for Verizon, not being able to authenticate has to be fixed by calling into the tech line so they can generate a new authentication key for you. it's a single button. easiest done if you make a call during the process so it can be pushed to the phone (dialing *611 as it will complete that call) but can also be manually typed in if needed.

Re:Central point of failure..

[rickb928]

Yup. My wife's Curve will go three days, and would longer but she drives to work through the desert where there is no service. Hunting for service DRAINS the battery.

Re:Central point of failure..

[Anonymous Coward]

Dump on RIM if you want, but their platform works very well. Outages aside, it is a superior corporate solution, and makes most other platforms look like pants. Wait, are there ANY other corporate platforms?

Well, there's Windows Mobile.

...

Never mind.

Re:Central point of failure..

[rickb928]

1. My G1 actually polls my POP server directly. And it fails.

2. T-Mobile's authentication servers went down in that outage. If Verizon suffered the same outage, your call to customer service will in vain.

Re:Central point of failure..

[NovaHorizon]

1. My moto Droid polls the emails accounts I use directly, and works fine.

2. We're talking about the voice authentication, correct? If so, that sucks. If not, sorry but I thought we were.

Re:Central point of failure..

[kimvette]

RIM employees had mod points yesterday!

Re:Central point of failure..

[Anonymous Coward]

But in most cases the pushed email arrives much later on a blackberry compared to a WM phone with active sync. With active sync the phone polls the server directly. With BES the server pushes the e-mail to the phone through numerous middle men.

Nope. Typically email arrives on my blackberry less than a second of it arriving in outlook.

And the repeated polling from the activesync pull client drives up your data bill, even when you're not sending or receiving any email, because the phone is checking all the time.

With push email the data bill is zero unless there is email to send/receive. Those of use without unlimited data plans (or roaming internationally) appreciate the reduced data usage.

Enron days

[Anonymous Coward]

And stockvalue goes up up up...

Thank you Karma

[Gothmolly]

BB users are the biggest type-A douchebags around. They differ from their hipster iPhone douchebag brethren by typically wearing suits, talking loudly on their phones while waiting in line, and driving faux-retro American sedans. I knew when I woke up this morning that it would be a good day, as if millions of douchebags cried out and were suddenly silenced. Merry Christmas to all.

Re:Thank you Karma

[gregarican]

True in a lot of ways. Perhaps a _brief_ outage would put people's lives in perspective. In all actuality you really aren't that important and being in constant contact with the rest of the world in real time through your hip-holstered cell phone isn't that important either.

People seriously need a "mental health" to unplug from the grid and take a chill pill. What better time of year than right leading into the Holidays to do this?

Reminds me of places I've done IT support. Our core billing systems, inventory systems, accounting systems, etc. would be down and it was a PITA to the end users. But god forbid if Internet or e-mail access was down. You'd think that the CHQ was on fire and Milton was running away from the scene. :-/

Re:Thank you Karma

[Anonymous Coward]

would be down and it was a PITA to the end users.

I love pita, with garlic sauce. So why did the end users complain, then? Did you offer them cocktail sauce as secondary choose?

Re:Thank you Karma

[sakdoctor]

I'd like to see a medium-long facebook outage.
Certain hardcore users would get physical withdraw symptoms, coma, then death.

Re:Thank you Karma

[gregarican]

Actually I mistyped this TLA (Three Letter Acronym). Should've been PETA. Most of the office staff would parade around wearing faux-fur coats and whine about the poor spotted owl and the mid-Atlantic one-eyed trouser trout...

Re:Thank you Karma

[Anonymous Coward]

For the moment, let's put your issues of raging jealousy aside.

Could you please explain what a "faux-retro American sedan" is?

If you want a Blackberry that badly, just pick one up. Their relatively cheap these days.

Re:Thank you Karma

[gregarican]

This isn't that much of an exaggeration. Actually I am one of the legion of Facebook junkies and I actually might have to break down and read a book, watch a TV show, or clean my house. Egads!!!

Re:Thank you Karma

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like YOU are proud of the fact that you're rude.

I tossed a large Coke on the head of a prick like you in a movie theater the
other evening. Of course he was answering emails on his smartphone, which he
foolishly imagined was his right to do DURING the FILM. But the large Coke
put a damper on all that.

Think about that, Mr. Douchebag, the next time you're being a prick in a public
setting. Not all of us are going to sit back and tolerate your bullshit idly.

Re:Thank you Karma

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it were Kyocera users. No day goes by without me I'm in an elevator and one of them jerks walking in and holding the door open while they finish their call.

Re:Thank you Karma

[jellomizer]

What is really good is if you cut the top half so you can stuff the Pita with a bunch of meats. Ham, Rost Beef, Turkey, Cheese and Bacon.

I am sure this isn't a PETA approved use of Pita but still it is really good.

Re:Thank you Karma

[ZeroExistenZ]

You should've said "it was a PITA in the ass", so it would be recursive.
Actually, PIA (Pita in the ass) would be a recursive TLA.


I believe you can generate a PITA fractal this way, somehow..

Re:Thank you Karma

[Anonymous Coward]

Splash damage!

Re:Thank you Karma

[Sponge Bath]

...unplug from the grid and take a chill pill.

Timothy Leary once said something similar.

Re:Thank you Karma

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they are almost offensive as technology class warriors who criticize them in a futile attempt to feel better about themselves...

Re:Thank you Karma

[R_Dorothy]

One of my duties in a previous job was looking after the BES and the Crackberry users. Someone once asked me if there was anything I could do as their Blackberry was waking them up when an email arrived in the middle of the night. I introduced them to the 'off' switch.

Re:Thank you Karma

[AnotherShep]

That's not a TLA, it's an ETLA (Extended Three Letter Acronym).

Re:Thank you Karma

[BronsCon]

Just because I OWN and USE a BlackBerry doesn't automatically mean I do those douchebaggy things. There are rude, ignorant people who own phones other than the BB or iPhone, or who don't own a phone at all. If someone can't put their phone away during a movie, don't blame the phone, blame the rude idiot user; and don't automatically assume that, because someone owns a certain phone they must be a douche. That's just a douche move, friend.

I mean, seriously, grow the fuck up.

That said, I would have thrown something at the guy, too... probably not my $10 drink, though. Dumbass.

Re:Thank you Karma

[hodet]

...I tossed a large Coke on the head of a prick like you in a movie theater the other evening.

And then you snapped out of your fantasy and returned to your movie.

Re:Thank you Karma

[Anonymous Coward]

I would much prefer a different mobile device but in order to have access to my work calendar on the mobile, the company forces me to use a BB. Of course, I have learned to use the "quiet" setting after hours so I am not bothered by work messages when I'm not at the office or on call. However, I can confirm that some people that I work with have not learned this lesson and get uptight if you haven't seen their e-mail with in a couple of minutes of it being sent and, yes, I would classify them as a classic type-A personality.

Re:Thank you Karma

[SmallFurryCreature]

Certain hardcore users would get physical withdraw symptoms, coma, then death.

And we would notice the difference how exactly?

Funny thing, Vodafone has had a lot of outages lately in Holland, and live goes on. The entire rail network was buggered because of a 10-15 centimers of snow, and live goes on. Belgium a while back went for months without a government, and live went on.

I think we let the media sell us to much the idea of drama. The tv especially needs some excuse for the drama of a live report from the scene of the action that any action will do.

Ages ago, we had an earthquake in Holland. Well a tremble. And all the tv news crews were desperate for a story. I remember one "These roof tiles have fallen down, in this bush, in the middle of the night. If someone had been standing in this thorny bush, then they could have been killed." Well yes. Small detail, the roof was barely 2 meters up. A person of average dutch height (2 meters) would hardly have his head split open by such an insane drop.

Re:Thank you Karma

[djroketboy]

What is really good is if you cut the top half so you can stuff the Pita with a bunch of meats. Ham, Rost Beef, Turkey, Cheese and Bacon.

I am sure this isn't a PETA approved use of Pita but still it is really good.

ahh yes, People Eating Tasty Animals... my favorite as well.

Re:Thank you Karma

[Red Flayer]

That's nothing on the douchebaggery.

The other evening I was at the movies and got an emergency email from my sister that my dad had a heart attack and was in the hospital (I had turned the ringer off, as I always do when I'm at the movies). THere were a few emails back and forth between her, me, my mother, and my brother coordinating flights, airport pickups, etc, so we could all be there at his side by Christmas.

All of a sudden, some fat stinking asshole douchebag threw a soda at me!

Heaven forbid there is some minor inconvenience to his enjoyment of a movie. I suppose it's fair, since living vicariously through movies is probably his chief joy in life.

Re:Thank you Karma

[IorDMUX]

My '98 Saturn, casual street wear, and BlackBerry Storm reject your hypothesis, but still sorely miss our Wikipedias.

And besides, I'm type B+, according to my donor card.

:-p

Re:Thank you Karma

[Anonymous Coward]

I had no idea that the dutch were such a tall people! With an average height of 2m, I'm surprised that there aren't more Dutch basketball players.

2m = 6'5"

6'= 1.8 meters

I think you meant the latter.

Re:Thank you Karma

[radish]

So given that I carry both an iPhone (personal) and a BB (work) - what does that make me? I don't wear a suit, or talk loudly, or drive an American car. I also don't live in Brooklyn, don't drink latte, am not a vegetarian and don't listen to "world"
  music. Any other awesome stereotypes you'd like to throw around?

Re:Thank you Karma

[tool462]

I want somebody to make an option in Farmville for me to "salt the earth". I'd go through, killing off their gardens, just to see their reactions when they realize how much of their lives they've devoted to a fake garden.

Re:Thank you Karma

[frosty_tsm]

True in a lot of ways. Perhaps a _brief_ outage would put people's lives in perspective.

Or make them actually spend Christmas with their families rather than faking it.

Re:Thank you Karma

[Achromatic1978]

The other evening I was at the movies and got an emergency email from my sister that my dad had a heart attack and was in the hospital (I had turned the ringer off, as I always do when I'm at the movies). THere were a few emails back and forth between her, me, my mother, and my brother coordinating flights, airport pickups, etc, so we could all be there at his side by Christmas.

And yet you didn't actually think it might be a good idea to leave the movie and do all your emergency email coordination in the lobby. Instead, you stayed in the theater. Why? So you didn't miss a minute of the latest Judd Apatow film, apparently of an equal priority to your father's heart attack?

Re:Thank you Karma

[I_M_Noman]

Could you please explain what a "faux-retro American sedan" is?

Your wish is my command.

Re:Thank you Karma

[socsoc]

You're trolling, but I'll bite. I also have managed a theater in my younger years.

You should have left the cinema and talked on the phone in the lobby. Obviously you would have been already distracted from the film and the light from a mobile screen is distracting to many people regardless of cinema design. You were an insensitive clod to your fellow patrons, your family and your dying father because you had to see the last part of Avatar even though you were no longer paying attention to the movie.

Heaven forbid your ailing father had raised a considerate child who cared about him enough to leave a film.

Re:Thank you Karma

[Anonymous Coward]

Being in constant contact isn't necessary to stay alive, however my BlackBerry does provide me with a better quality of life. I don't have to spend 40 hours in the office. I don't have to be near a computer. I don't miss out on orders (I'm in sales). The benefits far outweigh the negatives so the BlackBerry is a chill-pill itself.

Email going down is not similar to billing systems going down, it's similar to phones going down (also a major "CHQ on fire" scenario). Any time you cut-off a major communication channel that people *expect* to be available all the time, you have a major problem. Pushing invoices out a day or 2 late isn't quite as critical unless your cashflow position is truly screwed.

Re:Thank you Karma

[Red Flayer]

It was a joke (albeit poorly done).

Although I did have a point -- namely, that without knowing the nature of the emails, there may have been extenuating circumstances involved.

OP was correct, of course, that it was inconsiderate of the emailer to do so in a dark theater.

However, the appropriate response would have been to tap the guy on the shoulder and ask if he wouldn't mind doing his emails in the lobby. It's quite possible he wasn't even aware that he was causing a distraction. The emailer's douchebaggery was no excuse for the OP's douchebaggery in response. The OP's throwing of a soda in response to a minor distraction was way overboard.

Re:Thank you Karma

[NovaHorizon]

True in a lot of ways. Perhaps a _brief_ outage would put people's lives in perspective. In all actuality you really aren't that important and being in constant contact with the rest of the world in real time through your hip-holstered cell phone isn't that important either.

please, tell the customers at Verizon Wireless that a little bit more. We had people demanding credit all day because of the outage, even though it hit EVERY carrier. Not to mention the business guys that somehow lose $1000 every day that the email on their phone doesn't work yet feel it best to have their phone on a personal account instead of a business account when there's no price difference.

Re:Thank you Karma

[mdwh2]

...you say, posting on Slashdot.

Re:Thank you Karma

[Anonymous Coward]

Take your Karma and shove it, I'm A BB user who wears jeans and drives an S-10 You are a douchebag for that post and may Santa fly right by your friggin' house this year....

Better late than never?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn /. - more and more lately the posts on the site are running days behind in the news. This was reported on Engadget a day and a half ago. Fail.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/22/blackberry-services-down-in-north-america-yet-again/

Re:Better late than never?

[Yvan256]

Are we sure this isn't a dupe from 36 hours ago?

Re:Better late than never?

[GweeDo]

Actually no, that was a failure of just BIS. This is a bigger failure that affects messenger, BES and BIS.

Re:Better late than never?

[grub]

Slashdot: Bringing you Yesterday's Stories Today!

.

Re:Better late than never?

[LOLLinux]

No, this is the exact same story. If you RTFA you'll see that they have a final update that says that service has been restored.

Re:Better late than never?

[gregarican]

Just wondering why this was modded as Flamebait. It's 100% spot-on accurate. How hard is it to check if the story is still current/valid before posting it? If site this was a legit news site that'd be akin to posting a story about a big hostage standoff going on, when actually the hostage was already released and chilling out in a chair sipping coffee and eating donuts with the Five-Oh.

Re:Better late than never?

[Kagura]

Just wondering why this was modded as Flamebait. It's 100% spot-on accurate. How hard is it to check if the story is still current/valid before posting it? If site this was a legit news site that'd be akin to posting a story about a big hostage standoff going on, when actually the hostage was already released and chilling out in a chair sipping coffee and eating donuts with the Five-Oh.

In response to GP and P: Slashdot is an aggregator service, not a news service. Slashdot has always been this way and always will be.

Fail

[MonsterTrimble]

This is like the third time in three weeks that BB has gone down. Remind me again why my wife wants me to get one of these?

Re:Fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Remind me again why my wife wants me to get one of these?

She's a retard?

Re:Fail

[Yvan256]

A lot of women want a baby. It's a natural instinct.

Oh, you meant BB.

I don't see why your wife would want a Best Buy.

Oh, you meant BB. Sorry.

But you mean your wife doesn't already have a Belly Button?

Oh, you meant BB. I apologize.

I would tell your wife that the days of Bulletin Boards are over.

Oh, you meant BB. My mistake.

I don't see why your wife would want a BB gun though.

Oh, you meant BB. Duh.

Etc, etc...

Yeah, yeah... I know about context. But I also find it annoying when people use acronyms for no good reason. This isn't Twitter.

Re:Fail

[Anonymous Coward]

So she can exchange nude photos with her boyfriend?

Re:Fail

[bmo]

The antecedent was defined in the previous sentence.

  I find your lack of reading comprehension disturbing.

--
BMO

Re:Fail

[bmo]

Well, that sucked. There were "darth" tags around the "quote" and I lost them.

<buffett> Searching for my lost fake html </buffett>

--
BMO

Re:Fail

[karnal]

Did you just annoy yourself a little there?

Re:Fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe because your wife wants something that goes down once a week?

Re:Fail

[Anonymous Coward]

This is like the third time in three weeks that BB has gone down. Remind me again why my wife wants me to get one of these?

Your wife obviously wants something that will go down at least once a week.

Re:Fail

[MyLongNickName]

From your previous comment in a prior thread
"Oh yeah, my mistake. So, is there any commercial program out there which uses P2P?"

How is that any different from using "BB" in a response to an article about BlackBerry?

hth hand

Re:Fail

[AnotherShep]

She's a pilot now.

Re:Fail

[Yvan256]

Because P2P is an acronym and BlackBerry is a product name.

Re:Fail

[andrewd18]

I find your lack of tags disturbing.

Re:Fail

[MyLongNickName]

P2P can mean Point-To-Point as well as Peer-To-Peer. The point is you made a big hissy fit over something that you yourself do and something that in inconsequential.

Re:Fail

[Yvan256]

Never heard of point-to-point, thanks for pointing that out.

My point was that too many things use the same acronyms.

Re:Fail

[Anonymous Coward]

-1 sadly unfunny.

It's obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

A neo-con Rovian plot!!! I blame George Bush!!!

The Joke's on RIM

[Anonymous Coward]

My Blackberry has once again broken so I haven't been impacted by this outage. I haven't even had time to set up BB mail on my newest replaced Crapberry.

This is the first and last Blackberry I will ever owned, but because of Blackberry's poor quality, I'm now on my third one. Just trying to survive a 2 year contract on T-Mobile, America's worst cellphone company.

I don't know what phone I get next (Android or iPhone) but I promise I will never own another Blackberry as long as I live.

Re:The Joke's on RIM

[dbcad7]

So, America's worst cellphone company has replaced your phone twice. I can understand your annoyance at having a phone that keeps having to be replaced, but it seems like T-Mobile is doing their part to help you. Just a suspicion, but I think you'll be annoyed no matter who your cellphone carrier is.

Re:The Joke's on RIM

[HikingStick]

I'm a long-time T-Mobile user, so I'm interested to learn what your problems have been. A bit over a year ago, I was ready to drop them because I felt their sevice along I-94 through Wisconsin, and in Madison was horrible. I talked to my rep, and he suggested that it was my Samsung phone. He suggested that the Samsung phone I used (and many of the Samsung models) had poor antenna design. He gave me a free upgrade to a Nokia, and we took the same trip the following week with no coverage issues at all. Unless I'm traveling in the hinterlands, T-Mobile's coverage has been fine; their customer service has been great. They have an extensive network of roaming agreements and I have never incurred a roaming fee. I have two family phones through them, and my office BlackBerry is on their network. We have half of our office phones through T-Mobile, and half through Verizon. The general consensus is that Verizon has better signal strength overall, but their data network is much slower than T-Mobile's. Our installers who spend a lot of time in manufacturing facilities and food processing plants prefer the Verizon phones for their voice coverage (some of the T-Mobile users could not complete or maintain calls in the bowels of some facilities), but most of our mobile data users prefer the T-Mobile phones because the data service seems to be at least 4x as fast (based on casual observations).

Re:The Joke's on RIM

[BronsCon]

That's funny, I'm hard on my phones and my blackberry curve lasted just find until I was ready to upgrade... my Bold has been just as good. No Nokia, Motorola, LG, Kyocera, or Samsung phone I've ever owned has lasted until I was READY to upgrade (excepting my Nokia 6820, which I babied, so it wasn't put to the same tests as my other phones).

Are you buying refurbished units? My Curve survived the following:
A fall from a 16' ladder
A drop in a puddle
Being run over TWICE (I thought I left it inside, so I pulled back into the garage to go get it... I had dropped it and run it over twice)
Being dropped while walking and, subsequently, kicked across the room
Being sat on
Being stepped on

the list goes on...

I have a friend whose dog ATE his Curve 9 months ago. He still uses it; everything works fine, though half of the left side of the casing is missing.

WTF ARE YOU DOING TO YOUR PHONE?!

Re:The Joke's on RIM

[Anonymous Coward]

I have deadzones indoors everywhere - even the middle of the city. If I walk from one side of my apartment to the other, my phone may drop the call. I often have no service inside of bars. Actually I do have service - SOS mode from AT&T.

I've got to give some respect to the T-Mobile 1-800 customer service folks. The idiots at the stores could just drop dead for all I care. One guy gave me 2 different phony excuses for not replacing my phone on the spot, and I had to shoot both of them down. We don't replace smart phones - The girl on the phone says you do. We don't have any in stock - someone just called and checked, and if you weren't so damn lazy you would know you have some in stock.

Anyways, the dead zone in the middle of the city situation is just unacceptable. Combined with massive outages that they dont recognize but happen every few months, T-Mobile has lost my business forever. Just like Sprint did in the '90s. As for what happens to my phones, the scroll wheel has jammed - replaced through mail. Then the "4" button failed. Replaced by a failure of a person at the store.

It's either AT&T (which I have used and been generally satisfied with before) or Verizon Wireless, and never again T-Mobile or Blackberry.

Re:The Joke's on RIM

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not doing anything special to my phone - if anything I've been nicer to it than usual. I'm pretty used to my phone at least making it all the way through a 2 year contract.

The first phone I had from Blackberry eventually had the scrollwheel jam rendering it useless. The second one decided that I didn't need a "4" button, and that stopped working.

Every time I have a blackberry failure I research it online and find that many people have experienced the same problem. I bought my Blackberry based on their reputation. I would have thought they'd have this stuff figured out by now. Also, the BB web browser is a joke, and that one's on you. Opera at least works, but it's far from what you'll find on the kind of phone I'm going to be replacing my blackberry with.

Re:The Joke's on RIM

[cawpin]

Android, no question. The Droid has SOME faults but "The Network" is far superior in the US. Contrary to possibly-popular belief, and AT&T's ads, their network is not faster than Verizon's by a long shot. And if you don't want to spend quite as much, the HTC Eris is quite good as well.

In Europe the Milestone is the same phone.

Re:The Joke's on RIM

[mrdoogee]

I'd say that your beef is with RIM, not T-mobile. Rim makes the hardware that keeps breaking, T-Mobile is the one eating $400-600 every time your phone breaks. Now T-mobile's service may suck (I wouldn't know, I am with AT&T, who's service DOES suck) but the issue at hand you mentioned was Hardware failures, which really aren't your carrier's fault.

Re:The Joke's on RIM

[greg1104]

The first phone I had from Blackberry eventually had the scrollwheel jam rendering it useless.

The scroll ball on my Blackberry 8800 (through T-Mobile) broke in the on-position, rendering the phone completely useless, 5 days before the 1-year warranty wore out. Felt quite pleased, got a free upgrade to the current model instead (8830). That was 11 months ago. The scroll ball on the new one is starting to stick in the same way. My 2-year contract will be up in another month, and as much as I like the Blackberry service and the phones in general, it's hard to get too attached to the phone when it's got such an obvious design flaw to it.

Re:The Joke's on RIM

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds like my xbox 360, i am on my fourth

Re:The Joke's on RIM

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats funny. I'm on my fifth Blackberry. All have been made in Canada (I know some lower end models are often made in Mexico). I have never had one fail or die. I just upgrade because I like new phones. I admit nothing has the tank-ness that my 7200 or my 8700 had, but the 9700 is quite nice....

And TBH aside from RIMs recent outages, the track record has been *pretty good*... and until iPhone gets customizable email alerting, its just a no go. Android is a battery life disaster, not a serious phone for any serious usage.

One wonders...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

How long RIM's model of interposing their own(seemingly rather unstable) services lasts.

Obviously, when the carrier has some major fuckup, email/web aren't going to happen because the packets are being routed to their deaths, like so many binary lemmings, somewhere within the series of tubes.

RIM's presence in the loop, though, seems like an increasingly useless liability. Back when Blackberries were little more than pagers, in terms of hardware spec, RIM's service made sense. Now, though, phones are powerful enough to speak the same protocols as computers. Why, if my carrier is passing packets properly, and my mailserver is up, should RIM be standing in the middle?

Re:One wonders...

[adamstew]

It's so that RIM can take a slice of the monthly fee pie. Just follow the $$. Not only do they charge you for the device, they charge you for the privilege of using it each month.

Re:One wonders...

[nine-times]

I had an argument with someone about this topic a while back. It was a BlackBerry user who was insistent that a lot of value was added by putting RIM in the middle of your conversations... something about being able to email other blackberry users directly, and their Blackberry would get it even if their mail server was down... maybe? I don't know. Didn't make sense to me. And there was the fact that it was encrypted, and that you could have it push emails to your phone instead of your phone querying the mail server. That stuff is available for normal mail servers, too, so it's not much of a win.

I know Verizon also does (or used to do) something similar where Verizon downloads all of your email from your mail server through a desktop redirector, and then Verizon sends the email to your phone. They even encourage (or used to encourage) you to do things that way even if you have a Windows phone connecting to an Exchange server. I never understood the point of that kind of crap. Not only is it a single point of failure among all the Blackberry users, but it's an additional point of failure for each user. If my mail server is down or the carrier is down, RIM isn't making it so I keep getting mail. Plus it's an additional security risk. Why should my (or my company's) email be sent to some third-party's server unless it's absolutely necessary?

Re:One wonders...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I know why RIM wants to do it, I'm just curious how long they'll be able to get away with it.

I'm sure that they'll hang on in enterprise setups that have all sorts of hardcore BES integration baked into their process for a fair while; but, if I were them, I would fear pretty strongly for their future on the consumer/business without significant legacy side of the market.

With the availability of push-IMAP and/or activesync licensing, it wouldn't exactly be rocket surgery for a carrier to say to HTC, or one of the other OEMs that actually make all the handset hardware, "Give me something that looks more or less like a Blackberry, and is fast enough to run a decent mail client and browser under Android." They could then take that, pair it with a data plan, and sell it as an email-centric phone with smartphone features without giving RIM a dime, or incurring any downtime because of their systems.

Re:One wonders...

[alen]

the estimate for iphone sales is 10 million this quarter. Apple and RIM have different quarter time frames so it won't be for a little while until we find the real sales numbers. RIM sales seem to have flattened out while iPhone sales are skyrocketing and it's cheaper than RIM depending on the device.

so i would guess that Apple is going to poach RIM customers as contracts expire

Re:One wonders...

[adamstew]

They are going to have to go multi carrier before they do this. I think they've poached the majority of people they are going to by being tied to AT&T.

Once they're on Verizon, look out. Their sales numbers will likely double over night in the US market.

Re:One wonders...

[blincoln]

something about being able to email other blackberry users directly, and their Blackberry would get it even if their mail server was down... maybe? I don't know.

A user with a BlackBerry can send an email directly to a user with another BlackBerry (bypassing their normal email system) if they know the device PIN of the recipient. Things may have changed in the last couple of years (I don't have to deal with BlackBerries anymore, thankfully), but the last time I checked RIM's recommended approach was to do something like regularly send an Excel file with each user and their device PIN to each of their BlackBerries for use in this kind of situation.

It seemed to me like one of those things that was an interesting piece of trivia, but unlikely to ever be used. If we had actually lost an Exchange server, it would have been much faster to bring up a replacement (that would give users the ability to send and receive new email until the mailbox backups were restored - what Microsoft calls a "dialtone" replacement) than to try to teach managers and executives how to copy device PINs out of an Excel spreadsheet and into a new message on their BlackBerries. Maybe it takes longer to do the equivalent with Domino.

Re:One wonders...

[swb]

I think the cracks are showing in the facade.

It used to be if you wanted email on your Blackberry, you had two choices -- the desktop sync software (which blew donkey dicks) or BES. BES worked well and had all kinds of gee-whiz management features for places that insist on gee-whiz management. But BES was complicated, expensive and generally required its own box/VM due to a laundry list of "don't-install-with..." conflicts.

Then came a reduced cost Blackberry server (Blackberry Small Biz or some other name) that was much cheaper and limited to maybe 10 licenses. Now they have some other one (Blackberry Professional?) that is essentially free for one user and appears to have eliminated some of the conflicts that drove BES to its own box.

Consumers and solo users can use the "Blackberry Internet Service" which looks to me when I've set it up like a web-interfaced hosted BES with a limited feature set (get/send email on a variety of systems & protocols, but no calendering or contact management).

I don't know how long they can keep this up, though, before they have to start allowing direct-data and bypass the RIM centric model.

Re:One wonders...

[Anonymous Coward]

...email be sent to some third-party's server unless it's absolutely necessary?

Not to mention that said third-party is not even a US company.

Re:One wonders...

[MightyMartian]

I do some part time work for an organization that's big on Blackberries, and I look at the amount of resources on top of the Exchange server that supporting these devices takes. I fail to see the point. I asked the guy why not switch from Blackberries to one of the other smartphones with a decent IMAP client? Then you can just use the IMAP service that comes with Exchange, kill a server and make the whole management process that much easier.

The devices, the way they work, none of it makes any sense from a technical point of view. I realize that the underlying justification is that they can sell another service on top of the phones, but it just strikes me that Blackberries, in this age of powerful smartphones, are a rather expensive anachronism. If I was a corporate customer (which seems to be the primary consumer of these beasts), I'd be switching to an iPhone or Android or something like that that has a good email client. Phones have reached the point where they're as powerful as the Windows boxes I was configuring eight or nine years ago with precisely this functionality. I simply cannot fathom adding the pointless expense of a BES server.

Re:One wonders...

[swb]

For phones connecting to Exchange, ActiceSync capability (supported by Google, Apple, WinMobile, and I think Android) is better than IMAP.

I can't understand the justification for BES either unless whatever security provided by it is really meaningful to the organization in question.

I have a number of clients who CONSTANTLY ask me if they can get a Blackberry. I always tell them they will need the BES & infrastucture at $$$$ but they can do iPhone/WinMo for free. They're never satisfied (which has nothing to do with the handhelds themselves).

I think showing up at the big tough corporate meeting with your Blackberry is some kind of status symbol -- it shows you're important enough to have somebody pay for your Blackberry, mobile phone service, AND a BES license. I guess.

Re:One wonders...

[nurb432]

So they can generate revenue of corse... If you don't need them, then they become a marginal player at best and will lose all their power.

All joking aside, someone needs to step up and provide a corporate solution that doesn't have a single point of failure that is out of your control.

Oh god no internet on my phone!

[jeffmeden]

Panic panic panicpanicpanic

Wait, I am posting this from my blackberry via BIS (RIM internet)...

Oh well, apparently the Armageddon is still a few days off.

Re:Oh god no internet on my phone!

[LOLLinux]

Oh well, apparently the Armageddon is still a few days off.

No, if you read the article (which is from yesterday) you would see that their final update stated that the service was already restored. This is just Slashdot being late to the party.

Re:Oh god no internet on my phone!

[Norsefire]

Before you decided to be a smug prick on the internet did you consider the fact that Blackberry's Internet services were down for 8 hours but are now fixed? That perhaps when the story was submitted, the service was down but due to the delay in the story reaching the front-page the service is now restored? Did you think about that?

Of course you didn't.

Apparently the Armageddon is still a few days off.

Re:Oh god no internet on my phone!

[MooseMuffin]

You posted from that thing? You're braver than I thought.

Seriously though, you didn't actually come to slashdot and navigate through the comments on the default BB browser did you?

Re:Oh god no internet on my phone!

[jeffmeden]

Before you decided to be a total tool did you consider the fact that I noticed the outage yesterday afternoon (when my BBMs weren't getting through), followed the situation to it's completion on crackberry.com, and just decided to post in order to get a laugh (after laughing that slashdot just now started covering the 'story' right around the same time it was over and done with)?

Of course you didn't, you're a tool with no sense of humor. I would nickname you 'Chainsaw', but irony is probably lost on you too.

Re:Oh god no internet on my phone!

[Bourdain]

I'm sure it wasn't at&t in NY, it takes 5 minutes to even bring up a web page outside in times square

and that's on a good day

No, its for being at retail..

[tjstork]

My mom uses her crackberry to text me when she's buying presents for my son. I imagine a lot of people use their blackberry's that way. So now we are back to Christmas shopping circa 1985. It's positively barbaric!

Re:No, its for being at retail..

[Yvan256]

Strangely enough, the toy of the year was Optimus Prime in 1985. Not sure if there's an Optimus Prime toy for 2009, but given that the second Transformers movie came out on DVD a few weeks ago, I find your comment funny.

I also find it sad that cartoons and toys of 1985 are now the blockbuster movies for 2009. Hollywood lost its touch two decades ago.

Re:No, its for being at retail..

[MBGMorden]

I'll admit that that's become pretty common for shopping in general. My mom is a shopaholic. She hits thrift stores, the Goodwill, yard sales, etc looking for "the deals" (I think Antiques Roadshow did this to her). Generally I just leave her be on that, but she knows that I have things that I like (old guitars, M&M's memorabilia, telescopes, etc). If she finds anything that she thinks I'd find remotely interesting I get a picture message of the item asking if she should buy it.

While I kinda questioned the usefulness of camera phones when they first came out (and still find it hilarious that people were using those 0.3MP phones to take any pictures they want to keep), I must say that being able to instantly show someone an example of an object you're looking at over the phone is a nice thing.

Re:No, its for being at retail..

[tepples]

I must say that being able to instantly show someone an example of an object you're looking at over the phone is a nice thing.

Then why do so many specialty stores, such as Spencer's, have "no photography" policies?

Re:No, its for being at retail..

[MBGMorden]

I'm sure they exist, but to be honest aside from you mentioning it here I've never even heard of that. It's certainly never been enforced (closest I've seen is art shows that forbid photography, but that's a bit different). I've only done it once (it was a pic of a funny baby sleeper I was thinking of buying for my niece), but nobody said anything.

Re:No, its for being at retail..

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's great. I loved all the toys and cartoons of 1985 as a kid, and now with full movies and things coming out, I can enjoy it all again as an adult. I'm not a bit sad about that at all.

Re:No, its for being at retail..

[Chris Mattern]

Because it's nice for the shopper, not the store.

Re:No, its for being at retail..

[Bigbutt]

I've been doing something similar. When I had to go to the hardware store, I'd take a picture of the project and/or the problem and show it to the guy. The first few times, the guy was "wow, good idea taking a pic" but then more people started doing it and it's pretty common now.

[John]

Re:No, its for being at retail..

[tjstork]

Then why do so many specialty stores, such as Spencer's, have "no photography" policies?

Probably because every tiny detail of the interior of a retail store is considered proprietary information. It's not just pricing, its arrangement of items on shelves, everything.

Re:Christmas Shopping now? Um... No.

[charliebear]

Actually, Blackberry has been advertising frequently lately, and if you were thinking of buying one for a Christmas present, and hear about the outage.... maybe you reconsider.

Nothing is Out or Broken

[Murdoch5]

As soon as I read this I tried to go online and send a BB message and all the fun and pointless stuff my crap berry allows me to do. Everything worked perfectly and with pretty good speed. It's possible that the outage only effects certain carriers or maybe just certain data plans but as far as my phone goes everything works

Re:Nothing is Out or Broken

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the outage was over several hours before Slashdot reported it.

Thank Mirapoint

[Anonymous Coward]

RIM buys their email servers from a company called Mirapoint. Mirapoint, on the other hand, is big into offshoring to India, especially their QA. That's why this stuff keeps happening on a regular basis.

Re:Christmas Shopping now? Um... No.

[LOLLinux]

Except the outage is already over and has been since yesterday.

Oh, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

another outage, huh? Well then, rag about AT&T's shitty network all you want. My wife's iPhone outage count as of this morning: 0

Re:Christmas Shopping now? Um... No.

[timeOday]

The vast majority of BB users are business users and many people are already on Christmas vacation, so I'd say the 23rd of Dec. is a very lucky time to have such a severe outage. Unless you're a BB engineer who must work around the clock until it's fixed.

This was yesterday's news

[hicks107]

This was yesterday's news, typical slashdot.

A blackberry outage? Oh my!

[ratnerstar]

Crap, no work emails on Christmas Eve? Whatever shall we do?

Re:Christmas Shopping now? Um... No.

[Critical Facilities]

Maybe the cause is a disgruntled BB Engineer who didn't get a Christmas Bonus.

Re:A blackberry outage? Oh my!

[LOLLinux]

Service has been restored for hours. CmdrTaco is just an idiot who posted this story long after the fact.

IT Needs to Learn from TV

[RobotRunAmok]

As a TV Master Control honcho in a previous life, I read stuff like this and I shake my head... hours?? DAYS?! In broadcasting, that's not an outage, that's a carefully orchestrated attack by space aliens. Why does anyone on the corporate management level even remotely tolerate this? What, there's not enough money changing hands over at RIM to merit hiring the right professionals and institute the proper safeguards and procedures? The infomercial that aired at 3AM on Channel 11 has a better back-up plan than RIM's entire service? It boggles...

Re:IT Needs to Learn from TV

[jjoelc]

Amen! I am currently working in engineering, keeping master control going at a TV station... And I would have to think real hard to come up with a system here that does not have redundancy built in. If we went off-air for that amount of time, then God himself had better be signing the paperwork! (Even then it may not help!)

Re:IT Needs to Learn from TV

[maxume]

My local broadcast stations have had a couple of hour plus outages since the DTV transition, so perhaps 'new' has something to do with it (some of them were because they were unhappy with coverage and they upgraded power and changed locations).

Re:IT Needs to Learn from TV

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 most insightful slashdot post ever.

This is why IT gets no respect.

Re:IT Needs to Learn from TV

[fermion]

Or just unfortunate luck. I recall when a TV station in my area was off for months when an antennae fell over. As it is a day or two of outages is not unheard of.

But broadcast tv is not the best example, cable is. The primary reason that I do not have cable is that the reliability was crap, and all too often something happened on a holiday weekend. 99% reliability was not good enough.

I think that blackberry simply knows it has a captive market. There is nothing that offers the control freaks equal levels. It is a wonder that MS was never able to provide an equal solution, given they essentially did it on the desktop.

Re:IT Needs to Learn from TV

[Rich0]

This is why IT gets no respect.

IT operates under the constraints given it from above.

I'm sure my CIO gets a bonus of $5M for slashing costs, and a bonus of $5k for not having any outages that year. If the CEO reversed the incentives, we'd have a ballooning budget, but a much higher quality of service. I suspect the CEO likes it just the way it is, however.

The important thing is for IT to be up-front about levels of quality and costs. People at work complain all the time about how fast the support team is. The support management offered to have people waiting by the phone with the expertise to solve the most complicated problems, but obviously nobody cared about that enough to pay for it.

You get what you pay for...

Re:IT Needs to Learn from TV

[deblau]

Television broadcasters send their content via transmission paths that they (usually) have complete control over: TV towers, satellites, and cables. Barring the laws of physics breaking down, or some kind of massive jamming event like a nuclear strike, broadcast TV will always work (although there are problems with reflections, ghosting, interference, and so on). Same for satellites, except on certain rainy days. Cables always work, except When Backhoes Attack.

Email and web browsing use an uncontrolled network -- the Internet. Data pass over systems outside the direct control of the provider. You can't reasonably demand the same uptime and QoS. That being said, this particular incident appears to have been a software foul-up under RIM's direct supervision, which should have been preventable.

Re:IT Needs to Learn from TV

[Anonymous Coward]

15 Years in Broadcast Engineering myself, in a top-10 market. I'm sorry, but the one-way nature of broadcasting, which is based on WWII-era technology (NTSC standard ~ 1947) is in an entirely different ballpark in terms of complexity.

Rolling a duplicate tape or slug of an infomercial in one city doesn't quite compare to restoring and re-indexing a live database during an outage for a global service.

Behold the grand future of Cloud Computing!

[ErichTheRed]

I've noticed a lot of these kinds of outages lately, not just with RIM but with other network providers. They usually seem to follow a failed routine-maintenance cycle. Do carriers really not design their networks and systems to support rolling upgrades and the like? More importantly, has there been a breakdown of the test-and-release cycle that's supposed to catch these things before service dies for everyone?

I guess the other thing might be all the third-party hosting and outsourcing that goes on in IT...how many people want to bet that half the outage time was trying to figure out where exactly the fault was? From experience, that gets a billion times harder when your system is hosted by a third party who won't say a word to you so they can avoid taking blame (and SLA hits) for it.

Makes me wonder about cloud computing...the technology concept is great, but how many large organizations will trust all their data to machines they don't directly control? These days it doesn't make sense to host everything yourself, but companies really have to be careful to choose competent service providers!!

Re:Behold the grand future of Cloud Computing!

[greed]

I don't know about the network providers, but I know IBM Rational's ClearQuest product has _absolutely no provision for testing_. Sure, you can designate a test database, but that's not what I mean, and I don't think it's what you mean, either.

What _I_ mean by testing is taking a snapshot of the production system and then run our planned changes against it.

This product has no provision for doing that. And the DB schemas are opaque (or at least undocumented), and doing a copy of the underlying database does NOT result in the copy being used: it goes back to the original. (Ignoring the thousands of files you need 'cause the blasted thing is written under Eclipse now.)

They aren't alone. Near as I can tell, the trend to "rapid deployment" has made creating a representative test copy nearly impossible.

The best thing I've been able to do with some products is dump all the filesystems on the original server, restore them into a VM, and put the VM into "Host-only" networking mode so it can't get to the original server.

Don't worry all you crack-heads...

[tyroneking]

... from the site linked in the article: "* FINAL UPDATE: Things are back to normal. RIM Statment to follow."

This is the second outage in a week apparently (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2009-12-23/rim-reports-second-blackberry-outage-within-a-week-update2-.html) .

ITProPortal has the funniest story about this (http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2009/12/23/rim-blackberry-service-hit-yet-another-e-mail-problem/): "The substantial number of users on online forums whining about the issue indicates the gravity of the matter and how widespread the issue is."

Problem is that I depend on a T Mobile powered GPhone - and while T Mobile have been pretty solid, Gmail has had its problems - also my home ISP is always messing around with DNS servers or disconnecting me for magically stupid reasons.

We really need some legislation to mandate a minimum service provision.

SMTP/POP/IMAP

[Pascal Sartoretti]

In the meantime, the worldwide SMTP / POP / IMAP still works fine and serves millions (if not billions) of users with standards-based protocols.

Re:SMTP/POP/IMAP

[alen]

so how do you get your email on your phone without opening up the POP and IMAP ports on your firewall? there are only 2 ways for this and that's RIM or Microsoft.

Re:SMTP/POP/IMAP

[Pascal Sartoretti]

so how do you get your email on your phone without opening up the POP and IMAP ports on your firewall? there are only 2 ways for this and that's RIM or Microsoft.

Or you can establish a VPN from your phone.

At least with Microsoft, you don't have a single point of failure !

Re:SMTP/POP/IMAP

[Anonymous Coward]

At least with Microsoft, you don't have a single point of failure !

Yeah, there are probably dozens of points where the Microsoft stuff can fuck up and cause you grief! That's way better!

Re:SMTP/POP/IMAP

[Anonymous Coward]

so how do you get your email on your phone without opening up the POP and IMAP ports on your firewall? there are only 2 ways for this and that's RIM or Microsoft.

Well if you want to participate in this whole intraweb messaging thing and access your email from someplace other than the console then you probably are going to be opening up those ports.

That said, the value in RIM and Exchange ActiveSync is the sync of contacts and calendars. Something that POP and IMAP can't do.

Re:SMTP/POP/IMAP

[greed]

How about opening the POP3S and IMAPS ports, instead? And put some sensible password restrictions in. And use TLS SMTP with mandatory login on the SMTPS port. I have users on Palm Treo, Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, iPod Touch, and more.

The server I run can also be set to require client SSL certificates. I believe the iPhone "Profile" feature is where this would be set up for corporate clients; when I imported my SSL CA certificate, it created a profile automatically.

Re:SMTP/POP/IMAP

[ceoyoyo]

Microsoft?

I know one of my IMAP accounts is hosted on some sort of Linux or BSD machine. It used to be a Cobalt server, but I think they switched that a while back. Another is on a Red Hat machine in the lab. Another is definitely a non-MS machine, since you can use Pine to read it. The last is a Mobile Me account, so I really doubt it has much to do with Microsoft.

Re:SMTP/POP/IMAP

[nxtw]

He is referring to Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync protocol, which runs over https and provides push mail, calendaring, contacts, and has more management features than using IMAP(S) alone. There's no need to use any Microsoft software at all to use the protocol: it's implemented by open source products and by Google.

Re:SMTP/POP/IMAP

[Pascal Sartoretti]

Yeah, there are probably dozens of points where the Microsoft stuff can fuck up and cause you grief! That's way better!

I prefer to operate Microsoft software under my control than to rely on a single company such as RIM for the software and its operation.

And I prefer to operate open source software than Microsoft software.

Re:SMTP/POP/IMAP

[Pascal Sartoretti]

He is referring to Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync protocol, which runs over https and provides push mail, calendaring, contacts, and has more management features than using IMAP(S) alone. There's no need to use any Microsoft software at all to use the protocol: it's implemented by open source products and by Google.

No need to use any Microsoft software ? Yes. But you need to first licence ActiveSync, see here the companies who did it (and probably paid a lot of money to Microsoft). No open source software there.

Using a (proprietary) protocol such as ActiveSync is better than relying on a single point of failure, but using a standards-based protocol would be better.

Re:SMTP/POP/IMAP

[Anonymous Coward]

If RIM could actually do IMAP correctly, LogicMail probably wouldn't exist. "Standards-based", indeed.

Re:SMTP/POP/IMAP

[ceoyoyo]

Are you sure? You need to license ActiveSync to write software compatible with Exchange. I don't find any indication that the other push e-mail solutions require it. Yahoo has their own system based on SMS notifications, Apple does support Exchange but also has their own push system based on Mobile Me, and the IMAP protocol has been extended (or is being, I think it's still a draft standard). I think Google supports both ActiveSync and Push-IMAP as well, now.

I realize business users get kind of stuck in the Exchange/Blackberry box, but that doesn't seem to be any more a reflection of the actual available options than how they used to insist you had to use an Exchange compatible e-mail client because POP and IMAP (i.e. the way the rest of the world does e-mail) simply didn't exist.

Re:SMTP/POP/IMAP

[Anonymous Coward]

At least with Microsoft, you don't have a single point of failure !

What about your server?

Re:SMTP/POP/IMAP

[Pascal Sartoretti]

At least with Microsoft, you don't have a single point of failure !

What about your server?

You can have a backup server (hot, warm, cold...). If you are really paranoid, you can have a spare Unix system ready to take on if your main Windows server fails.

If you use the Blackberry service however, you rely on them. Better check their SLA...

Re:SMTP/POP/IMAP

[Pascal Sartoretti]

Are you sure? You need to license ActiveSync to write software compatible with Exchange. I don't find any indication that the other push e-mail solutions require it.

The ActiveSync licensees use it only to implement clients. As far as I know, the only ActiveSync server is Microsoft Exchange.

Re:SMTP/POP/IMAP

[ceoyoyo]

Yes, that's what I said. You need to license ActiveSync to write an ActiveSync push e-mail client.

There are lots of alternatives to ActiveSync for push e-mail, which do not require using any MS software (server OR client). Push-IMAP would seem to be just what you asked for - an open, license free standard for push e-mail. SyncML is another possibility.

uh

[ZenDragon]

Is this still a problem? My blackberry is working fine... I havnt had any problems all day or yesterday and I've been on it hourly at the least. In fact it almost seems to be faster right now than it has been in a long time! Maybe thats because everybody else is out! haha In any case, I have t-mobile.

Re:uh

[HikingStick]

I also have T-Mobile and have not noticed any disruption in services. If there was a disruption, it was short-lived and while I was sleeping.

I blame bing!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I got my BIS service back today, and it looks like they pushed a bing! app out. Coincidence? I think not.

Re:I blame bing!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, yeah, I noticed that, too. At first I thought maybe it was our BlackBerry admin playing a joke and pushing it (Bing) to our phones, but I guess it came from higher up. I'm on Verizon. So I agree, it's Bing's fault.

Re:Christmas Shopping now? Um... No.

[Arimus]

Or a BB engineer who gets a nice load of cash for being on call and an even nicer load of cash if they have to do anything... :)

Working fine for me

[acoustix]

I received emails all night long on BES. My wife's BB on BIS is also working fine.

The last outage didn't affect me either.

Dang, I had to use my BB as a phone

[frank249]

It took me a few minutes to realize that my BBMs were not going through. I ended up just calling. Funny how after you are used to BBMing and emailing, that having to make a phone call and actually talking to someone seems to bother me.

Reduction in crashes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love to know if there was a drop in vehicular crashes during the BlackBerry outage.

Re:Reduction in crashes?

[DamienNightbane]

Not at all. The outage actually caused me to crash my car yesterday because I wasn't able to look something up on google maps while in town and wasted a bunch of time looking for it instead. This made it so that by the time I was able to start heading down to Reno to go Christmas shopping, it was dark, cold, and the roads had become covered with a light dusting of snow and black ice.

To make a long story short, the outage caused me to spend an hour and a half 30 feet down a hill on the side of the road surrounded by sage brush and snow before the CHP could get a truck with a winch to pull me out.

According to SANS, you're a little late slashdot..

[Anonymous Coward]

UPDATED 6:00AM CST (bambenek) - It appears Blackberry's network is back up. The outage affected only those applications that needed to go through that network. Native IP was working fine, but seemed to be all providers.

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7798&rss

And yet...

[ericrost]

And yet strangely I can post this comment from my 'berry.

Re:And yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet strangely I can post this comment from my 'berry.

You must be posting from the future, long after the outage has ended. Or maybe Slashdot is stuck in the past...

Re:And yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

but evidently not RTFA or you would have read that the outage was already over.

Re:And yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, mine works as well.

Mine has been working fine all day

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Storm on Verizon, and it's been working fine all morning. Email is being pushed and Gmail is working fine... you sure it's not just your carrier or segment?

Contact the engineer

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope they have given the Engineers who will fix the fault something else other than a Blackberry phone ;)

Re:BLACKBERRY IS US ONLY SO N.A. IS IGNORANT !!

[acoustix]

RIM (the company that runs the BB services) is a Canadian company that operates globally. So the original post is correct in saying North America.

Channel 11 did not have a backup on Nov 22, 1987

[Anonymous Coward]

Channel 11 did not have a backup on Nov 22, 1987.

Best. Gift. Evar.

[gravyface]

Mine's down and I've had the most productive day that I can remember. Thank you, RIM!

Re:Best. Gift. Evar.

[andrewd18]

Congratulations! Your most productive day in recent memory involves posting comments to Slashdot.

No problems with my "Curve" on Verizon..

[the_rajah]

I use Opera mini as my browser and have the gmail app for my email and calendar. That seems to avoid these problems. I've had my BB for almost a year now and like it a lot.

Re:No problems with my "Curve" on Verizon..

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it hits those too, or at least it did mine on AT&T. Note that by the time this article went up on /. the issue was already over, so you may have missed the whole ordeal. It wasn't an issue with the browser itself, all your data stuff didn't work for the brief period.

failure modes ..

[viralMeme]

Shouldn't they built in some sort of redundancy and allow for failure modes. I mean just how difficult is it to move bits from A to B .. ?

Re:failure modes ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't they built in some sort of redundancy and allow for failure modes

Brilliant I say! Why I think you would be a hell of a CTO for our company. Such innovative ideas rolling around in that head of yours. I am summoning our current CTO and have him pack his things in short order. Welcome to Research in Motion!

Sincerely,

The Big Boss Man

Re:failure modes ..

[Anonymous Coward]

There are already multiple levels of redundancy, but even more being rolled out in the spring.

It's all about the fees

[Dzimas]

The Blackberry business model predates the arrival of the current generation of smartphones. RIM charges telcos a monthly fee for each subscriber using the various Blackberry services (messenger, mail and data). Licensing the server technology to cell providers would cost RIM a fortune in monthly license fees, because no doubt the wireless providers would negotiate huge discounts. I also suspect that the blackberry.net infrastructure is a tangled mess that would challenging to support when run by countless telcos around the globe - it was never supposed to get this popular.

Re:A blackberry outage? Oh my!

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Well, show me the way
To the next signal bar
Oh, don't ask why
Oh, don't ask why

Show me the way
To the next signal bar
Oh, don't ask why
Oh, don't ask why

For if we don't find
The next signal bar
I tell you we must die
I tell you we must die
I tell you, I tell you
I tell you we must die

Re:Channel 11 did not have a backup on Nov 22, 198

[Minwee]

Channel 11 did not have a backup on Nov 22, 1987.

And yet it was still back on the air less than two minutes later. That's still less than 1% of the expected RIM outage.

Perhaps he's TOO Happy...

[Anonymous Coward]

TheHappyMailAdmin writes ...

My Blackberry seems to be working fine. Perhaps the Happy Mail admin has been indulging in Christmas Cheer.

The End of the...?

[SumterLiving]

Does anyone out there think this should be a non-story? Is this an end of the world event that some people cannot text or browse the web on their cell phone for 24 whole hours? Geez, in the last 10 years I have had 3 or more instances where I lost power to my house for 8 hours or more. I have had at least 6 instances where I lost all water to my house for at least 12 hours (bad water system). And I never saw more than a few lines in the local newspaper about these highly inconvenient events. Yeah, I understand that lack of electrical power or water is not quite as dramatic as losing my ability to send a text message but really!

few hours of gadget down is of issue to you guys??

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi
I am from India, it is very sad to see how much you western folks worry about work and down time and not bother normal human life..

In my are in india i would loose power atleast once a day and in summer 3 hour daily power outage....

I think we should learn to use that time to chill ourself and look at the world rather than banging head on the pc or gadget

What outage?

[ScottyMcScott]

I'm posting this from my blackbe

Re:What outage?

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy thinks he's funny.

I wish there was a way to filter out the seven-digit ID posters.

BIS & BES

[DiSKiLLeR]

I can't stand blackberry's BIS & BES. Phones these days are clearly powerful enough to just speak the same protocols computers can, why have mandatory middlemen for everything? gah.

I hate my iPhone for a lot of reasons, but I still use it because its wayy better than BlackBerry and being forced to use special blackberry plans to have access to use BIS & BES. Fuck that.

Outage? For Serius?

[lot3k]

Funny thing. I received the RIM server outage notification from my blackberry. Then I looked for news reports about it via my phone's browser. I then sent some BBMs to my friends and co-workers to test the service. I did experience a 10 minute hiccup in service last night around 5 to 6 cst, however it was just that, a hiccup. BBs are great corporate phones, and that's the reason I have one. What's with all the hate? Most wouldn't classify me as a corporate whore, but I consider my blackberry an indispensible tool for completing my job and maintaining connectivity. I work infrastructural IT in an enterprise environment, I can't really afford to not know what is going on. I've been through various smartphones before finally caving and going to BB. I've got to say, with a BES in place, the constant VPN like connection is a god send.

Is it just me?

[gregarican]

Or are Blackberrys the equivalent of the Palm Pilots of years gone by? A hardware platform that at the time was innovative and ground-breaking, only to be surpassed by the next wave of competing devices. Most of the people I know with a Blackberry are a few fries short of a Happy Meal when it comes to technology. So perhaps that's the right device for them. But with other alternatives out there why settle for one that's also bundled with a somewhat-unreliable back end infrastructure?

My phone only makes calls

[SlashDPC]

I use my Blackberry for everything but making phone calls. Right now, all it can do is make phone calls. This is unacceptable.

How about restricting year-end outages?

[andawyr]

At my company we have a change freeze from mid-December to mid-January to avoid problems such as this. With a large (40B+) company, you need to have a stable environment to perform year-end financial activities, and an outage like this would be completely unacceptable.

While I don't personally use a Blackberry, I would be asking some serious questions about their change policies before I relied too heavily on a BB for business purposes...

BoostBerries UNITE!

[JayEmbee]

This is why I carry a BoostBerry! Opera Mini for Web GMail BB App for email GMaps BB App for mapping and nav TwitterBerry for Twitter jmIRC for IRC No reliance on RIM for ANYTHING! Granted, my data rates are slow as sin on iDEN, but it does it's job.

Re:BoostBerries UNITE!

[socsoc]

I really thought you made that up until I looked into it...

Re:BoostBerries UNITE!

[JayEmbee]

Indeed, the Boostberries are real! 7100i and 8350i. Like I said, iDEN is "teh sux0rz" speed wise, but otherwise, it means RIM's problems are not my own! Granted, I could do a single-user license of BES and go that route, but why bother when I can do all of it with 3rd party apps via iDEN CSD?

Re:BLACKBERRY IS US ONLY SO N.A. IS IGNORANT !!

[kiloechonovember]

Who is this 'Blackbetty' to whom you refer?

you laugh but

[commodoresloat]

Santa and the elves are all on BlackBerries. They love the push email features. Now how the hell are they going to coordinate all those late night pickups and dropoffs? And Mrs. Claus won't be getting her usual midnight sexts via BBM this year. This is truly a crisis.

No admin can guarantee immediate e-mail delivery.

[nuckfuts]

The outages refer to e-mail. Users can still make an old-fashioned phone call.

Using any e-mail system for time-sensitive communication demonstrates a lack of understanding about how e-mail works. Most of the time it's fast and dependable, but problems can always occur along the way that will cause messages to be delayed. Most MTA's in default configuration will retry for days to deliver a message if the receiving server is not responding.

If you need to contact someone urgently, e-mail is a poor choice.

yeah you can post but

[commodoresloat]

Let's see you reply in thread...

Re:BLACKBERRY IS US ONLY SO N.A. IS IGNORANT !!

[Jawn98685]

Who is this 'Blackbetty' to whom you refer?

Classic rock, dude.

Who-oh-oa, Blackbetty...

Outage? Who cares? Platform War!

[Anonymous Coward]

Blackberry's an aging platform, but the things it does right have keyboard ninjas like myself completely hooked. Since this discussion will devolve to OS/UI-bashing and platform comparisons anyway, here's my list of smartphone must-haves:
1) Home screen keyboard shortcuts (m for messages, o for options, etc.) Having to search for and click an icon is just inefficient.
2) Customizable shorthand (hig > how's it going, fm > from, etc)
3) Lag-free handling of 5k+ messages
4) Keyboard-activated select/cut/copy/paste
5) Proper multitasking (I can simultaneously SSH while running a search through server-side+local messages AND zipping a folder)

Is there another platform that can do all this? I'd love to migrate to better hardware + UI, but it all seems gimmicky and plain inefficient in comparison to my customized Blackberry setup.

Re:Outage? Who cares? Platform War!

[Anonymous Coward]

On Android:

1: Android can fire off apps exactly like you specify.
2: Sorta. I've not done it, but I'm sure its possible.
3: I don't have 5k+, but do have a ton and my current Android device doesn't choke on them.
4: Maybe, I've not tried yet. This is probably the biggest Android weakness.
5: Currently, my Android phone is doing a wget while I'm doing other things, so it can multitask decently.

To be honest, Blackberries are old and creaky, but for what they do, they are excellent. They are also the top of the line when it comes to actual security. Other than the central choke point RIM has, Blackberries are top notch when it comes to security, offering not just PIN protection, but even use of a Bluetooth based CAC reader for access to the device. Windows Mobile has some quality encryption. Since Apple is so secretive about what they use for encryption for the 3GS, it makes me leery. If a company doesn't trust me enough to document how they encrypt stuff, I don't trust them with my data. Now, if Android could have some intrinsic encryption, either via block level like loopback encrypted filesystems, or file level with EncFS or CFS type functionality, it would help things immensely.

Mod parent down

[Bourdain]

Most of us forget that the first single-point-of-failure is probably a cell tower.

I think you're extending this concept of a "single point of failure too far". Don't get me wrong, I think blackberries are, by and large, well designed and I have a belief why they maintain their proxy system (i.e. to control their lucrative discriminatory pricing/licensing strategy).

Blackberry proxy design is deficient for end users though and represents a true "single point of failure". This is because, unlike in your examples, a problem with their proxy specifically affects large numbers of blackberry users.

A problem with a tower is not a single point of failure. It's one of thousands of points of failure for a carrier in the context of the whole network.

Coupe of things...

[Khue]

I manage both iPhones and BES at an office of about 100 devices. Here are a couple small anecdotes about the 2 technologies: 1)iPhone support was an after thought in Exchange or at most, an added feature for Exchange 03. This doesn't really make me feel too confident in the technology. 2)iPhone remote wipe feature does not always work for some reason. 3)iPhones have huge hard drives and give people opportunities to save content to the local device. There are no hard disk encryption technologies that I know of that support the iPhone. The amount of data you could grab from a company then jump off the cell phone grid is unsettling 4)Crackberries have policies, controls, filtering options etc that sys admins love to see. 5)Crackberries are corporate issued in most instances. Corporate assets given to individual users do not get the same respect as hardware bought by the users. I have yet to see a company start giving out iPhones as a policy. This being stated, I tend to think people treat Crackberries with a lot less respect then iPhones. 6)End to end encryption 7)Support that is not based on the whim of Microsoft. I could go on forever. People that use cellphones for personal and not work related matters and do not have significant knowledge of back end processes and phone management will never get blackberries and last time I checked, no one who uses a blackberry in the manner it was supposed to be used ever really wanted anything more then a blackberry.

Oh! Oh! Me! Me!

[msimm]

I bought a Curve for myself, as a personal phone (out of work baby!). I can tell you at least 3 reasons I bought it none of which involve c-level thinking: 1) it's not tied to either Verizon or AT&T (I cause enough bullshit in my own life without the help of these service providers) 2) it looks/feels nice to use and carry 3) decent media player (although I use flipside mostly as my media player) 4) lots of useful application (two of my favorites are midpssh and logicmail).

To make the bb phone even more usable try operamini. Oh, and I've just installed google voice which looks like fun.

Naturally I'll be moving to an android when 1) they look/work a little more iphone/blackberry slick (am I the only one who hates HTC phones?) 2) I can actually afford one.

pings with a note?

[Anonymous Coward]

I recall when the floodgates from AOL were opened and we had to listen to this "ping" this and "ping" that everywhere on usenet and web forums.

Because, you know, AOL people were cool and said things like this, even though they had no clue what a ping was.

Moral of the story: Slashdot journalists now do it so it's time to move on to greener pastures. This place will never be the same again.

Typically

[physburn]

I finally upgrade to a blackberry compatible phone, and network goes down, to welcome me.

---

Mobile Phone Feed @ Feed Distiller

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