BlackBerry Problems Subsiding After 12-Hour Disruption
Posted April 18, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
BlackBerry users affected by a massive outage that prevented them from receiving e-mail for 12 hours overnight are breathing a sigh of relief, as their devices appear to be coming back to life.
The system failure at Waterloo, Ont.-based Research in Motion – the company behind the hand-held communication tools – affected users across the Western Hemisphere beginning at about 8pm EDT Tuesday. By mid-morning Wednesday users were starting to see new messages in their inboxes again.
RIM now has to find out what exactly caused the technical problem, which also apparently affected access to the Internet but not phone service.
“Root cause is currently under review, but service for most customers was restored overnight and RIM is closely monitoring systems in order to maintain normal service levels,” the company said in a statement.
“E-mail delivery was delayed or intermittent during the service interruption.”
Some users reportedly weren’t affected by the glitch, but for those who were response from the Canadian company was perceived to be lacking.
Within hours of the system failure, Internet message boards buzzed with users discussing the problems and questioning why there was no apparent response from RIM. A phone message at the firm’s customer support centre, 1-877-255-2377, said the company was experiencing “technical difficulties with BlackBerry services that may cause delays in sending or receiving” e-mail messages.
Dubbed “CrackBerry” by many of its ardent users, the device is relied upon by many businesses as a way to communicate between offices, hammer out deals, and generally stay in the loop.
“This certainly suggests that this was the type of catastrophic failure that exceeded their contingency plans,” said Jesse Hirsch, a technology industry watcher.
“Certainly customers and shareholders should ask after today whether their contingency plans were sufficient. Guaranteed they had redundant systems that allowed for a minor outage. This suggests something went horribly wrong.”
Hirsch suggested that RIM’s two network operation centres, one of which is supposed to serve as a backup, both went down. That wasn’t confirmed by RIM spokespersons.
According to U.S. statistics there were 8 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide as of last year.
