BlackBerry Outage

By  |  Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 9:03 am

Bloomberg is reporting a BlackBerry outage that affects e-mail for every BlackBerry user–not a unique occurrence. Given that companies with BlackBerries run their own servers, I’d love to see a coherent explanation of why RIM’s technology is such that a single point of failure can cripple its entire customer base…

(UPDATE: RIM says the outage is over.)

 
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5 Comments For This Post

  1. GR Says:
    December 17th, 2009 at 10:09 am

    The issue, which has stung them many times over many years, is that ALL Blackberry emails are routed through their data center in Canada. So if they have a failure in that location, or a bad software upgrade on the servers, the entire thing collapses.

    Its surprising, that with this being known, that the US government is such a heavy Blackberry user.

    It has always been this way. See articles going back as far as 2005 below where they defend this approach. Any yet, outage after outage, they continue to defend it.

    See:

    http://bit.ly/71hPD7
    http://bit.ly/6AVSxI

  2. Barry Says:
    December 17th, 2009 at 10:30 am

    Not all companies using Blackberries use their own internal server. Many — such as my company — rely on BB servers to push e-mail out to subscriber phones. When they go down, we don’t get e-mail.

    Barry

  3. JOEL Says:
    December 17th, 2009 at 10:36 am

    It is 10:30 pst and still no emails I talked with verizon and blackberry about lack of communication with their customers. Neither companies have posted anything on their websites. Hard to believe that there is such poor communication about an outage of this importance.

  4. Ron Says:
    December 17th, 2009 at 11:38 am

    I believe only BIS went down not BES. Our VZW blackberries on BES never had a problem.

  5. Joe Says:
    December 18th, 2009 at 4:48 am

    Blackberry should give in to the Dark Side (ActiveSync) already. Until they do, I’ll continue to steer our users away from Blackberry because not only does it work better, it’s immune to these types of single-point-of-failure issues that aren’t under our control.