Blackberry to Explain Why World Still Turning

BBs still down, now not only Emea and Latam but North America too.

Rim were kind enough to set up a page with their updates:
http://www.rim.com/newsroom/service-update.shtml

"Core switch failure" on the news was described as a "major failure, like a large switch not working".

It doesn't quite convince me they know what a core switch is.

I've just listened to RIM press conference and they said the initial problem in EMEA was indeed due to a core switch failure.

Prolonged outage in EMEA was has spread to LATAM because of the backlog of messages that were waiting to be delivered to Europe. Every time somebody from outside of EMEA send a message to EMEA, that message could not be delivered but it had to be stored somewhere (for a delivery later). So messages destined for EMEA started to pile up all over the world on RIM's servers and this has slowed down LATAM first and later North America. It really does makes sense as BBs are extremely popular in LATAM, less so in USA and Canada. This also explains why BES user are experiencing problems, their messages go through RIM's servers too (fully encrypted of course).

What they haven't explained is whether to initial issue in Slough was resolved now and they are just dealing with a backlog. My guess would no so I am not very optimistic about tomorrow. Backlog must be even bigger so I don't see how they are going to solve this. However they've said that every single message will be delivered sooner or later, they are not planning just to wipe them out and start with a clean slate.

As long as they're pushing them out at a higher rate than new ones are coming in, they'll catch up. The problem may be a lot of emails and especially BBMs are time sensitive, so by the time they do deliver them they're going to be no use to the recipient anyway. May even just cause confusion if someone gets a BBM saying 'going to the pub this evening, come along' which was meant to arrive on Monday...

This has permanently hurt them, I think. RIM trade on basically three things - you get your emails/BBMs securely, you get them now and the handsets are nice. This just kicked one of the three legs of that stool away.

Jon

Our BES server is now working as normal.

My private BB has been working properly all day today.

It seems that the outage wasn't confined just to Earth

a bit of a spoof 'my blackberry isn't working' ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrTzCh2nCEc

"It's heartwarming the way the mobile phone community has shown their respect for Steve. Even BlackBerry held two days silence in his honour."




Fantastic sketch! Loved it when it was on last Christmas, I hope they do something similar this year.

This all goes to show how machine dependent we all are now. As soon as something electronic dies - be it Blackberry, iPhone, or similar, everyone goes into a panic. At times, I wonder how the hell we survived without such things.

We had different expectations.

Research In Motion Offers Free Premium Apps to Customers Following Service Interruptions
http://press.rim.com/release.jsp?id=5214