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BlackBerry Outages Across North America

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the iphones-are-just-slow dept.

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.

21 of 284 comments (clear)

  1. Central point of failure.. by NeuralAbyss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Central point of failure.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Central point of failure.. by th3_ev1l_m0nk3y · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Central point of failure.. by Alioth · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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).

      --
      Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
    4. Re:Central point of failure.. by lewiscr · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

      Ask IBM.

  2. One wonders... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:One wonders... by nine-times · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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?

  3. Oh god no internet on my phone! by jeffmeden · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Oh god no internet on my phone! by Norsefire · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Oh god no internet on my phone! by jeffmeden · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

  4. No, its for being at retail.. by tjstork · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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!

    --
    This is my sig.
  5. Re:Christmas Shopping now? Um... No. by charliebear · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Thank you Karma by gregarican · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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. :-/

  7. Re:Works for me by MBGMorden · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
  8. Re:Fail by bmo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The antecedent was defined in the previous sentence.

      I find your lack of reading comprehension disturbing.

    --
    BMO

  9. Dang, I had to use my BB as a phone by frank249 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    --

    Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.

  10. Re:SMTP/POP/IMAP by greed · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  11. Re:IT Needs to Learn from TV by Rich0 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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...

  12. Re:IT Needs to Learn from TV by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  13. Re:Thank you Karma by Achromatic1978 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?

  14. pings with a note? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.