Last week BlackBerry had 4 days of service meltdown. There is no other way to describe it, as users battled to access their email and use BlackBerry Internet Services (BIS). It all started on Monday morning as users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa saw that their message folders were empty.
Many customers experienced service interruptions and delays over a period of approximately 3 days in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa, 1.5 days in Latin America and Canada, and 1 day in the United States. Global teams worked around the clock to contain the issue and minimize the impact to customers as much as possible. As of Thursday, October 13, service levels returned to normal.
Not one peep was heard from BlackBerry, even though the signs were loud and clear there was something wrong, something very big indeed.
Users trying to access the Internet and use BlackBerry messenger all were greeted with error messages stating that access to servers were not possible. These problems are all features/ strengths of owning a BlackBerry.
The official cause of this problem is a switch that failed at BlackBerry in Slough,UK. A back up also failed to ensure normal service for all BlackBerry owners. As the problems all hit users in the aforementioned regions, by Wednesday it was also emerging in Latin America and North America. The problem was compounded as servers had messages that still needed to be sent. Think of having a bucket below a leaking tap that over time will spill over. Well that is a leymans explanation for the backlog that RIM had on its servers.
BlackBerry has started to do damage control and have offered to have premium apps available for free.
The complete selection of premium apps would become available to download at BlackBerry App World over a period of four weeks beginning Wednesday, October 19. The selections over this period would include the following:
SIMS 3 – Electronic Arts
Bejeweled – Electronic Arts
NOVA – Gameloft
Texas Hold’em Poker 2 – Gameloft
Bubble Bash 2 – Gameloft
Photo Editor Ultimate – Ice Cold Apps
DriveSafe.ly Pro – iSpeech.org
iSpeech Translator Pro – iSpeech.org
Drive Safe.ly Enterprise – iSpeech.org
Nobex Radio(tm) Premium – Nobex
Shazam Encore – Shazam
Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant – Vlingo
Various cellphone networks have begun to issue some sort of compensation for the outage. RIM needs to do more as it has broken the trust that users had in their services.
“We are grateful to our loyal BlackBerry customers for their patience,” added Mike Lazaridis, Co-CEO of RIM. “We have apologized to our customers and we will work tirelessly to restore their confidence. We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again.”
Disclosure: I was one of the millions users affected and thus may be a little subjective on this topic.
