Thursday, 19 April 2007

BlackBerry Blackout

BlackBerry users throughout North America experienced a sudden widespread outage late Tuesday disrupting their use of wireless e-mail services.

The root cause of the system failure is still unknown but according to a CNN report, Research in Motion said Wednesday morning that services has been restored for most customers.

Users reported irregular email services or receiving bunches of backed-up emails whilst other had no access at all.

Phone services, however, were not interrupted.

The BlackBerry device gained popularity back in the 1990s for those who wanted to access email, the internet and phone calls on the go.

It has been widely received especially by the business world which has become increasing dependant on instant email access. Therefore, it was considered a blessing when the outage took place at about 5 pm Pacific Time when the workday was almost over.

Whilst RIM remains silent, analysts have suggested that the interruptions may have been caused by one of RIM’s Network Operating Centers (NOC) crashing - apparently not its first case.

BlackBerry services offered by companies connect their mail servers to a BlackBerry Enterprise Solution (BES) server located on their grounds which is linked to one of RIM’s two NOCs, both located in Canada.

Although most users are irked by the situation and RIMs failure in communicating properly with its users during the event, many say they will remain loyal to their “CrackBerrys” as they consider its services to be superior to the alternatives adding that other services experience such downtime on occasions as well.

The problem comes at a time when the Waterloo, Ontario-based company reportedly added 1.02 million subscribers last month which gives BlackBerry a round figure of approximately 8 million subscribers in total worldwide.