Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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?
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. :-/