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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.
What did one Blackberry owner say to the other?
Nothing!
Summation 2
Clearly, there is a ghost in the machine. And his name is Steve.
And nothing of value was lost.
Also, BB owners shoulda thought of that before buying a phone with a centralized web proxy and messaging!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You'd think they would have highly paid people to foresee these kind of problems and have a contingency plan for to prevent a massive outage? Nah, they cost too much.
Like many software consultants who travel all over the world, I have family and friends on BBM from many different countries. I have also come to rely on the blackberry for IM and email on the move. To make things worse, I also bought a BB Playbook which pairs nicely with my BB. And since it cant do email over wifi, the Playbook has also become essentially unusable for me. I'm on BIS ( not BES ) I would have been fine if I got a text message from ROGERS saying "hey BB service is down we'll be back in 3 days" - instead I am experiencing silent and sporadic outages. RIM, you've let me down.
they pull a major fat rabbit out of their ass
Blackberry has some weird apps for their phones...
Yes, it's a good thing to mention that the iPhone 4S is sold out and coming out this week. Because as we all know, iOS 5 doesn't move almost every single existing feature that iOS has onto the iCloud, where similar outages can now affect Apple users.
Nope. Definitely worth mentioning the iPhone 4S, because it totally competes with the Blackberry when it comes to enterprise services and security.
Oh, wait, everything I've said so far is wrong. Oops.
Seriously, what does the iPhone have to do with a Blackberry outage? No one using a Blackberry is going to switch to the iPhone, because the iPhone doesn't fill the same niche in any way. If you want a phone that can play Angry Birds, get an iPhone.
If you want a phone that can integrate with your existing IT infrastructure, you get a Blackberry or an Android.
The RIM outage might push more people over to Android, but it's not going to push anyone to iPhone. The iPhone is a shiny consumer toy, it's not a serious smart phone. The fact that the great new features for the iPhone 4S are a camera and a greeting card service is proof enough of that.
You obviously don't use BES or BBM. BES service is still down, we got notified by our Boxtone service that as of 8am EST we had over 40% of our users with pending messages and it's gone up to near 100% now.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
I just switched from a Blackberry to the Motorola Bionic on Sunday. I feel lucky now.
Who cares about that outage, Id buy a blackberry before a stupid iPhone anytime, you know, something working better without paying extra money for a ugly design.
Mr. Lazaridis,
You really should be working on that outage rather than posting here.
Regards,
grub
Trolling is a art,
No B infrastructure?
No testing?
Bet the business made lots of money though.
Deleted
"The power of the force has stopped you, you hosers."
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.
I just rebooted my berry early yesterday for the first time in several months. I then went ahead and installed all the available software updates.
I'll try to do software updates at less important times next time.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It's funny how so many people jump all over RIM in a situation like this but completely forget when the east coast earthquake knocked out all the Android and iPhones and BlackBerrys were the only thing working.
A) the antenna design is a slightly altered on that was introduced with the Verizon iPhone. The antenna design is actually very good, you get much better reception with the larger external antenna - the only downside was the gap you could touch to potentially drop a call (if reception was weak), which has been moved to where you can't hit it accidentally. It's also not like you cannot affect signal strength similarly with almost any phone, search for "HTC death grip" and see what I mean. Your meaty hand does a great job of reducing signal strength when you wrap it around any phone tightly.
B) You can opt for Verizon or Sprint for voice service, which have better call quality - but slower data feeds. With the 4s at least you can still roam in GSM countries even if you have Verizon, which is nice. That stopped me from leaving AT&T before.
The annoying thing though, is that you cannot buy an unlocked iPhone to use with anything but a GSM carrier. I was hoping to buy an unlocked hone and try Sprint for a while... so be aware if you wanted to get an unlocked phone for international travel you'll be using AT&T.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It doesn't move "almost every single existing feature" onto iCloud. Literally every single iCloud feature is optional. Here's the breakdown:
* Option to do backups to iCloud server.
* Apps have access to a Dropbox-style storage space for syncing info across devices.
* Rebranding Apple's webmail, contacts, and calendar services to iCloud.
* Option to redownload previously purchased iTunes content on the device.
So if iCloud goes down:
* Have to do backups locally
* Angry Birds saves don't sync any more
* Can't check iCloud email, have to edit contacts and calendar entries manually on each device. (If you use iCloud for those.)
* Have to plug into computer to copy purchases
Whoop-de-fucking-do. It's exactly the same situation I was in if my Nokia stopped talking to Google Sync.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
On the first day of the European outage, I was leaving my office and a student got on at the second floor. She was texting on her phone and I asked her about that, since it was a Blackberry and, as she commented still working in the US. Her reply was illuminating.
"Yes, but they're on the way out."
If you can't catch 'em young, you're toast.
This is the big difference between iCloud and other cloud servcies. iCloud is primarily a synchronization platform, there's some remote storage but it's meant to always backs local assets, much more like Dropbox than Google Apps. A pure cloud solution would just let you read everything off the remote, but doesn't necessarily make it easy or friendly to maintain local mirrors.
If the servers go down, you lose the ability to sync, but you don't lose what you have.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
http://www.security-technologynews.com/news/uae-bans-blackberry-services.html
http://darkwap.mobi/technology-stuff/Blackberry-Ban-in-India
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"
About two years ago our company had a ... let's say ... rapid shift in IT personnel. The reason for this is not important to the story. Among the personnel we lost were the three admins who knew how the corporate blackberry server worked.
Three days, three hours, and 26 minutes later, the BB server went down hard and stayed down for a week and a half, while unqualified replacements struggled (not very hard, in my opinion) to restore service. (For the first four days they insisted nothing was wrong, and had all of us cycle through endless repetitions of restoring to factory defaults, reentering corporate account info, and other makework.)
Now, it's not for nothing that it's called a crackberry. Blackberry users (of which I was one) rapidly get addicted to the instantaneous gratification that is well implemented push email, and this is what Blackberry classically has done best. It's what they're known for. And when it fails, well, can you say "wholesale panic"??
Personally, I had an Android corporate phone talking to the Exchange server before the BB server went back online. I don't have push email, it's not as nice, but two factors forced the change: (1) I did not know when, if ever, the Blackberry enterprise server would be back online, and (2) I had no confidence in the new IT folks' ability to keep it up. My confidence was shaken. Blackberry as a platform had taken a huge credibility hit.
Now imagine that, only worldwide. They're dead. The very addiction Blackberry has encouraged over the years is now working against them.
Too bad, they make some nice phones. If our BB server had not had its troubles, I might still be carrying one.
Now the only question is, will they migrate to Android, or iPhone?
Like a lot of things, it depends on what you use it for. The non-technical will migrate to iPhone because they don't have to fiddle with it and iPhone has similar "mindshare", similar recognition amongst fellow executives, as Blackberry. The more technical minded, who have gotten used to replaceable battery and storage and regularly use "mass storage mode", don't really have a choice these days other than Android. Windows 7? It is to laugh.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Its acceptable and funny to make fun of Canadians, because it makes no sense. You've got a pretty decent economy, health care system, education system, great beer, doughnuts, ect. Its an ironic insult, that is really an insult at one's own nationality. Plus, everyone knows that the best comedians are Canadian, and they've given us a lot of material to work with.
So you'll just have to live with being praised with humour, or you'll have to move to the states.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Not if you run your own BB server. The communication between the proxy and your computer is encrypted using PKI.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
And that's a bad thing how exactly? Regardless of the means, the end result benefits the consumer and differentiates it from competition... But yeah, they need to fix the damn network, I want my messaging services back.
Bow before me, for I am root.
Roaming costs are only expensive because of the carriers, not for any technical reason.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
No its not, you are ignorant of the reasons for the ban.
They threaten to ban it because the data center holding the messages is not in their country so they can't just take the messages. Its sitting here, in America (or maybe Europe or Asia depending on where you are geographically). The government in those countries can get at your messages.
America on the other hand CAN get to those messages because the servers are in our country. Guess what, we can also get at the messages of Indian blackberry users too!
Guess what else, someone can hack Blackberry.com's servers and get at your messages. Or a blackberry employee can compromise your account. Or the US government can just seize the equipment or data on demand.
India can't do that, but lots of other people can. India simply wanted to be able to do the same thing America could do. They won too.
On the contrary, unless someone gains physical access to my iPhone or my mail servers, OR breaks SSL to the point that a 2048bit key is crackable, there is no way in hell they are getting my mail. And even if they get my mail server, they still have to decrypt the messages there.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
This.
Yes, you can use EAS or IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV to get an iOS, Android or WM/WP device to work, but none of them are anywhere near as secure or manageable as BES. For the consumer or light business user, yes, EAS is fine, and geeks can suffer with IMAP+DAV and it's limitations, but as you increase either the number of users or the security and manageability requirements, they don't scale. Anyone who says otherwise has never actually used BES and has no idea what it does.
That said, as soon as someone duplicates what BES can do on iOS, Android and/or WP, BlackBerry is dead to the enterprise. It'll be Symbian all over again, and RIM will be left selling featurephones to teenagers, third-worlders, and third-world teenagers.
There's some question as to whether or not RIM can even port what BES can do to their next-generation devices. The absence of BES manageability hurt the PlayBook's chances in the enterprise more than anything else about it, and the PlayBook runs that same platform. I get the impression that the infrastructure is old, creaky and not all that well understood by RIM's own people.
--srj/mmv
IMHO blackberries are still superior devices when looked at through the myopic view of being a for-work device. However.. as a "personal" device that occasionally gets used for work I'd prefer an iPhone/Android over a blackberry.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Not quite sure why you bring up the need of a dedicated network as a plus. Since it's just layered on top of the existing cellular/WiFi connection, you just added an extra point of failure as these last 3 days of outage are reminding lot of people. What does this "dedicated" network give you? the impression of improved security because your confidential, corporate email is now going through RIM's servers? The belief that other smartphones can't offer equivalent security? 2005 called, it wants its status quo back.
Besides - the UI on BB phones (I admittedly haven't seen BB7 in person yet - speaking only up to 6 here) is mind boggingly crude and awkward. The browser is disgustingly broken and unusable. Even the damn email client, this pony's one and only trick, sucks big time. Synchronizing additional folders requires a ridiculous amount of submenus, hidden options and absolutely unintuitive labeled functions on my Curve 9300. When on WiFi, it somehow "loses" the connection to my company BES every other day and can't reestablish it. It only resumes working if I delete and recreate the WiFi profile. The amount of crap cluttering the menus is unbelievable. Until a recent software upgrade it couldn't vibrate and ring at the same time. Even configuring a simple sound is an exercise in frustration, wading through a sea of confusing options (I have sound options for "Email", "Level 1", PIN", "Text Messages", BBM Alerts, BBM Groups, BBM New Messages. I challenge any new Blackberry user to figure out what the hell PIN does there and why you can assign a sound to it). The almighty and much boasted physical keyboard is not only wasting half the front of the phone, causing the screen to be stupidly small, but it's also dinky and cramped, and the damn number keys are a bloody hassle to operate. But who the hell needs number keys on a telephone, right?
The whole damn thing seems to have been design by a committee chaired by Ming the Merciless, it's a textbook COUNTERexample of usability principles. They can't die soon enough. Die. Die. Die. DIE. DIE. DIE. DIE.
My company didn't allow me to use a different phone even if I paid for by myself - but they acknowledged that a LOT of employees are unhappy with these relics and recently announced they are going to change this policy at the beginning of next year. Can't wait. RIM, you lose 5000 more customers.
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.