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BlackBerry Outage Spreads To North America
iONiUM writes "With increasing pressure on RIM to catch up to the new phones, and the upcoming release of the iPhone 4S, could this three day outage of BlackBerry's service be a nail in the coffin? From the article 'The service disruptions are the worst since an outage swept north America two years ago, and come as Apple prepares to put on sale its already sold-out iPhone 4S on Friday.'"
This is the same outage as was reported Monday. RIM has released a few details on what's happened: a failed software upgrade brought the system down, and, after repairing the first issue, the backlog of traffic overwhelmed their network infrastructure taking things down a second time.
Seriously though, this couldn't have come at a worse time. Like the summary says, the iPhone 4S is just about to be released, and I imagine a lot of angry Blackberry owners are going to run out and buy one.
Personally though, I'd advice them to think twice and to get an Android phone since I don't think the iPhone reception issues have really been addressed and they'd just be going from one device with reception but no internet access to a device that sports the exact opposite.
Summation 2
In the UK, on both outages, RIM has let the mobile networks take full blame for all of the issues - they haven't issued a statement, or let the networks know what to tell customers, with network call centers as much in the dark as the callers themselves.
No B infrastructure?
No testing?
Bet the business made lots of money though.
Deleted
Ehh, apparently you missed a memo or five. iPhones and Android phones have both been able to integrate into corporate networks for quite a while. I have full e-mail, calendaring, and contact sync from the corporate exchange server on my iPhone. We're talking a Fortune 100 multinational here, not "dude the e-mail server guy totally hooked me up with e-mail on my iPhone!" On top of that I can use the VPN server to direct connect to the corporate network and manage my systems from the wifi in the mall if there's an emergency. Maybe a Blackberry can do that too, I don't know, but there's nothing I need to do remotely that I can't do from my phone. I also happen to know for a fact that this is all true for Android too (the guy I replaced uses a Droid something or other and he had the same setup I do). The days when Blackberry could just say "yeah, but we have all the business clients" are long over. They need to compete on features, because business no longer goes to them by default.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Also, BB owners shoulda thought of that before buying a phone with a centralized web proxy and messaging!
And Apple / Android owners should have thought about the ability of the government/whoever to eavesdrop on their phone / text messaging before they bought their devices. I choose personal security over an outage every two years any day.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Since this outage started, the Battery life on my Blackberry Bold has been depressingly short. Today it was flat after just 4 hours...I hope the device isn't repeatedly going out to RIM servers and running up a crazy data bill (with nothing to show for it). That's the only reason I can think that the battery life would coincidentally drop radically...or...the battery simply failed at the same time as the outage. - COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT!
"If it's lost, it'll turn up. Things always do" "I love it when a plan comes together"
Not exactly. Blackberry operates a parallel e-mail system, meaning the typical user has corporate e-mail service via Exchange, with BES connecting Exchange to the world of Blackberry e-mail. An earthquake is a natural event that is addressed in disaster recovery planning. The earth shook, things broke, we get it. When BB has an outage (for whatever reason), people start to wonder why we need the redundant layer of BB service in the first place. Corporate e-mail (e.g. Exchange) is viewed as a necessity, while BES is optional. It is certainly possible to get a smart phone to process e-mail without BES.
I guess it all boils down to how reliable your core e-mail service is. In the companies where I have experience with Exchange coexisting with BES, BES was a nuisance but it almost always worked. We had a lot of downtime with Exchange, so for the most part we appreciated having our Blackberrys work when Exchange didn't. Better admins or a better e-mail server might have made us reconsider the value of BES, since it was an additional point of failure. But in our case it helped more than it hurt.