BlackBerry Outage Leaves Mobile Email Addicts In The Lurch
from the digital-crack dept
BlackBerry addicts across the land were left feeling withdrawal overnight as the service suffered a major outage. RIM says it's still investigating the cause of the outage, but perhaps it's just acting like a clever drug dealer and cutting off its customers for a while to make them feel just how badly they need the service. Joking aside, the outage won't do RIM any favors from its base of enterprise customers that have -- for better or worse -- come to rely heavily on the service, and may cause some of them to look at other, less centralized solutions. The BlackBerry architecture sends all the messages through RIM's servers, so if they go down, everything goes down, a point emphasized by this outage. The debacle is also likely to call into question if RIM has the capabilities to handle its recent growth spurt. RIM recently announced strong fiscal fourth-quarter results, in which it said it added a million new customers, to take its total user base over 8 million. Much of that growth was credited to general consumers buying the BlackBerry Pearl device, and if some overly sensitive enterprise users interpret that to mean their "business-critical" mobile emails are getting held up by the emails of a bunch of average Joes, it could be a problem for RIM.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Paranoia
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I didn't notice....
I have to say, this is my 8th smart phone and it's by far the best (a BB 8703e w/Sprint). Yes, I've had all the Palms and they were all terrible at 'push' email. And I'm saying that even though Palm is a client of ours....
Chris.
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I Noticed
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Debacle?
By the way, to the author, in the article the phrase "fiscal fourth-quarter" weirds out on mouseover, but doesn't act like a link. Mis-type in the code underneath? Or has the fall of western civilization has spread to you just by typing up the story?
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I have never owned a Blackberry, so I can't really offer much to this story, but the first thought that came to my mind was this - what if some coder who once worked for the company intentionally added something in to suddenly bring everything to a halt for a certain amount of time. I couldn't really think of a motive, other than the ego boost the person would get, knowing they were solely responsible for this mess.
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iPhone
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Business Critical Uses
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o.0
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Would you prefer decentralized failures?
Decentralizing wouldn't prevent Blackberry failures, it would just mean that different users would have failures at different times. And honestly, if my blackberry service is down I'm not gonna say, "well, at least somebody somewhere else probably still has service."
Decentralizing is only useful if the distributed systems take over for the systems that go down... but RIM already has failover systems, and at least for the last outage RIM said that they... um... failed too.
This article looks at why really high reliability is so hard.
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