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."

Comments

Re:Just imagine

[swanzilla]

If Blackerry was still popular.

Or if it happened to BlackBerry....with their 70M subscribers.

What?

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

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.

RIM is dead...

[vinn]

... 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.

Re:RIM is dead...

[TheRedDuke]

Just out of curiosity: how are you going to manage 40 Android devices? Consumers are fleeing RIM, but without some semblance of enterprise management tools, Android really isn't a viable alternative for a larger business or enterprise that needs to lock down/look after/manage lots of devices. You might be able to do it with Windows Phone, but WP7 management options are a shadow of the WP6's. Until there's a real challenger to to the functionality of BES (despite the nightmare), RIM will continue to rear its ugly head.

Re:RIM is dead...

[sodul]

You need 'Enterprise' tools to manage 40 devices ?!? Methinks (and from experience) that you will spend more time and money 'managing' the 'Enterprise' tool than to manage the 40 devices directly.

Re:RIM is dead...

[sydsavage]

A quick google of 'Android Enterprise Management' returned some potential solutions:

Zenprise
Good for Enterprise
3LM

Those were the top three. I'm sure there's more, including RIM's own Android management solution.

Re:RIM is dead...

[juniorkindergarten]

The reason for BES is to make sure that employees don't do stupid things and run up the data usage and cell minutes. Enterprises want locked down phones for control and accountability. Without that control corporations won't move from blackberry.

Re:Like Apple Messenger?

[ScrewMaster]

If they had simply used DNS names, they could fail-over on many levels simply by re-pointing DNS.

Maybe they were worried about DNS poisoning or something like that. Still should be a way to remotely update those "service book" addresses though.

It's as if millions cried out

[charleyb123]

It's as if millions of souls cried out ... and were suddenly silenced.

Re:It's as if millions cried out

[Moridineas]

...and the Babylon 5 fans come out of the woodwork. As if BlackBerry fans weren't annoying enough to begin with!

Re:It's as if millions cried out

[pnewhook]

Banylon 5???! I think you just lost your right to be on Slashdot.

Re:NoSQL, Baby!

[afabbro]

And, you know, SQL databases, too, since they scale very well.

BTW, why do you jump to the datastore as the scalability problem? It's not mentioned in the article. For all we know, it could be their internal Cisco routers that are overloaded or their WAN links or their 10-year-old Windows 2000 servers or something else.

Future Thinking

[BabyDuckHat]

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.

Re:Like Apple Messenger?

[hedwards]

No, it doesn't mean any such thing. I take it you've never heard of CARP or VRRP.

Re:Single point of failure...

[pnewhook]

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.

Complete nonsense. Even without RIM service, it still functions as a phone, internet access, and SMS text messaging. Basically everything you use a smartphone for. You just dont have access to the secure RIM enterprise data and messaging services. Neither does any non BB device, so basically the BB just downgrades to a standard smartphone.

Re:NoSQL, Baby!

[stinerman]

He's jumping to the datastore because he can't cunningly fit in a link to his presentation about NoSQL database software if he doesn't.

Campaign

[Corson]

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.

Re:Campaign

[gmhowell]

I bet RIM still have a few cards left up the sleeve.

Unfortunately for those who like RIM, the cards up their sleeves are the instruction cards for playing poker.

Re:Like Apple Messenger?

[lucm]

> if you look in the "service books" of a Blackberry device, you will find a lot of hard-coded IP addresses. This means that RIM is pointing all devices to a single server in a single data center on the end of a single circuit owned by a single provider.

Following this "logic", by using DNS it would have been possible to do what, change the single server in that single data center to another single server in another single data center? Or is it only when you use DNS that it becomes possible to do load-balancing and clustering?

> Some real morons running the show over there

Oh yeah, clearly the morons are over there

Well, at least Slashdot is consistent...

[dwm]

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.