Blackberry Service Back Online After 3 Day Blackout
Blackberry services are finally back online after a 3 day blackout that affected it’s customers worldwide.
Disgruntled Blackberry users have finally been able to send messages and emails after days of no service. Many are now taking to twitter to vent their anger at RIM, the company that owns Blackberry.
Blackberry customers worldwide started to have problems communicating via their devices such as the Blackberry Curve on 10th October. Now that the system is back up and running again they have to deal with a backlog of messages that will take a while to process.
It appears that a network switch failure at the BlackBerry UK data centre caused the problems but it’s now yet known why. The whole point of a network is that you have built in redundancy, if there is a something like a switch failure the traffic is routed elsewhere.
RIM say that they have redundancy on their network but that it didn’t function as it should have done, they are investigating why. I suspect some people will be looking for new jobs soon.
The service outage was the last thing that Blackberry needed after its business has performed badly in recent years against the iPhone and android handsets that have taken the market by storm. It’s tablet device has also had problems.
It also comes at a time when the iPhone 4S is released and Blackberry hardly needs another reason for it’s users to switch over to Apple.
It has been losing some of it’s core business customers since Apple made a targeted effort to support business users with the iPhone 3GS release.
I once support the Blackberry in a corporate environment and it had to have it’s own server on the network with all that that entails. Whereas, installing the iPhone 3GS was incredibly easy as it linked straight into the Windows servers that most corporates are already running.
Probably the biggest failings of Blackberry and RIM though are in the shape of PR. Sometimes the silence from the boardroom can be defining to Blackberry users wanting answers.
