Slashdot Mirror
RIM Server Crash Leaves Millions Without BBM
Several readers have sent word that "tens of millions of BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa have been unable to receive or send emails and messages through their phones, following an outage at the server systems of parent company Research In Motion." RIM has confirmed that they're aware of the problem and working to restore service. A former RIM employee said to The Guardian, "They didn't start looking at scalability until about 2007, when they had around 8M active devices. The attitude was, 'We're going to grow and grow but making sure our infrastructure can support it isn't a priority.' They have their own clunky infrastructure to do something that you don't really need a clunky infrastructure to do anymore."
Is that the last minute is either "next year" or "last week" depending on which side of the disaster you're on.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
.....
If Blackerry was still popular.
Isn't iOS 5 going to feature a very similar "clunky infrastructure" feature?
...
There are so many juicy choices these days.
Cassandra -- No Master Nodes, huge scalability
MongoDB -- Stores data in the BSON format
Hadoop/HBase -- MapReduce All the way.
In short, there are all kinds of high-scalability choices these days. They should not have to think twice.
(Will be giving a presentation on all the NoSQL dbs January 25th, 2011
Okay, why does a disgruntled ex-employee's rant about scalability and infrastructure come into play before we know that scalability or infrastructure was the cause of the break? Seriously, maybe the taco bell dog just chewed through fiber lines in NY and LA while on tour. Could happen to anybody.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
... they just don't know it yet. We have 40 Blackberry's in our company, but we purchased our last one about six months ago. I hope BES dies a painful, painful death.
Android, here we come.
----- obSig
Thats the problem with blackberry devices depending on RIM for service...
Your mobile operator could fail, but theres more than one operator...
Your own email server could fail, but your in control of this yourself and can take steps to fix it... Plus, it only affects you and not anyone else, you have a choice of email providers and if you run the server yourself its your own fault if it fails.
You are stuck with RIM service if you want a blackberry handset, you don't have a choice unless you switch to a different type of handset.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
It's as if millions of souls cried out ... and were suddenly silenced.
The company books ONLY show how expensive providing good service is. They don't show the enormous losses when inadequate investment in support infrastructure collapses.
Nothing of one was the othered.
In four years I'll be starting a company based on the idea of having a device that stores all your photos, emails, and applications locally so you aren't tied to the cloud.
This is generally the decision upper management makes. Step #1 Make the infrastructure as cheaply as possible in a way that works for the situation right now. Step #2 Get as many users as possible. Any band-aids that are necessary is just support for our infrastructure, and everything will magically scale despite our single point of failure. The justification for this, is that hardware is cheaper than software engineers, so it is cheaper to scale by just paying for better hardware. So, scalability should not be a problem as long as their engineers were competent building the initial infrastructure. However, this event shows they obviously were not.
. . . to ruin my chances of snagging a big, beautiful man.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
One word: CLOUD!
And you wonder why the shit fails and brings everyone down. Its the nature of cloud service crap.
Current infrastructure will be more than adequate to support the number of RIM users left a few years from now...
> have been unable to receive or send emails and messages through their phones
Maybe the users just don't hold their phones correctly, like it happened with another vendor...
lucm, indeed.
A campaign against RIM has been running in the media for the last few months. Before the iPhone and Android devices there was the Blackberry and I bet RIM still have a few cards left up the sleeve.
When you consider the fact that most of Rim's internal tools don't scale well and there built off broken technology it was bound to hit the outside world. Rim's general outlook is have it crash first and blame the coops later. Very little of there info-structure is designed to handle loading and expansion. I'm surprised it took this long to happen.
Wow, another Slashdot hatchet job on RIM. Heavy into Apple stock, are we?
RIM certainly has issues, and it may not survive. But it seems the Slashdot editorial staff wants to make sure.
Even when it's Google or RIM, an email server being unavailable isn't what I'd call "news".
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Oh wait, I don't care, I have an HTC Android phone. I gave up on RIM and their kiddie phones.
This would have been a first post if I had access to my Blackberry.
An even better idea would be to be able to sync things WITHOUT a damn iCloud at all! What a concept!
But you can ALSO do that. Without iCloud you are still perfectly free to sync media and applications onto the device, even if all you have is a computer and an iOS device and no network.
Why is having layers of possibilities not better than the alternative?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wow, another Slashdot hatchet job on RIM.
In Slashdot's defense, there were already several hatchets in place by the time they got there, and they were pretty obviously self-hatcheted. Slashdot is just pointing out the obvious.
When you have a central point of failure you WILL HAVE FAILURES. It's like saying the sun will rise. I've never liked Blackberries for that reason long before any obvious decline began; I greatly prefer systems that lack such points of failure.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Forgetting that iOS 5 is all cloud-based,
It's not cloud based. It is, to put it in manager-speak "cloud enabled". The technical point behind the distinction is that iOS5 merely always for the cloud to provide a device with MORE data which it then stores locally. It's not cloud based at all, as content and media is locally based but then distributed.
that great new feature on the 4S, the voice assistant, is ALSO all cloud-based.
Really more service based, but yes that requires a data connection. But you can use the system without Siri, that's just a convenience. It's not like Siri going down prevents you from doing ANYTHING you could do otherwise.
Apptards find out that maybe a walled garden isn't the nicest place to live after all.
Do we get to call you an Andtard? Grow up and think rationally, as your desire to make fourth graders laugh has clouded your technical judgement. Then perhaps you will not make such embarrassing and glaring mistakes. No wonder you post AC, if I were to post something as lacking in substance and fact I'd try to cover my tracks as well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The problem is not that system failures happen, but that businesses and people don't plan to deal with those failures.
Running your own email server will not prevent crashes. RIM crashes, Google crashes, a bazillion corporate email servers crash.
The trick is not to expect anyone to really deliver 24x7x365 uptime, because no one has ever actually done so. The closest they've come is playing word games with the service contracts and reason for outages so that they can still claim 5-nines uptime, even though their honest stats might be more like 3-nines at best.
I like a poster I read several years ago: "Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
on365 is a company that they hire and pay too much money for people to run their DC's next to a fixed BB-PM/Tech (which was me).
These are people that know how to rack a rail kit in in many ways and do it in the most incorrect way. People that don't know what cat5 is and how it works.
These people get payed in the UK more then 4000 pounds and they get hired by BB to work in NL, BE and FR. \
When I told them that they should hire fixed BB personal for DC's instead of people that cost more then managers and deliver less then a monkey, they were like.... Yes, we should, but we will not! ..... So I quit the job and waited for errors!
This is the second they made so far! ^^
Fucking brainless slashdork editors. Sometimes it feels like the people who say that blogs and other "user published material online" is killing journalism were right.
Whether it's constant or intermittent makes no difference, if access to those servers isn't available when you need it then you can't use those features.
If Siri is down you just use google or make an appointment yourself.
If iCloud is down you just listen to the music already synced.
The operation of the device does not RELY on them being up any one moment. The benefit that comes from iCloud would be just as good even if the servers operated only 50% of the time.
The point is that Apple is relying much less on the network nature of the cloud than other devices or systems.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
if icloud goes down then you lose all of them
Nope, I can still play music, or see videos, or use apps that have had data synced by iCloud.
For example 'Find my friends' when icloud goes down?
Yes, that is not part of iCloud.
There is not a feature of iCloud I can think of that stops you from using any aspect of it directly when down, the advantage of the local cache model.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley