BlackBerry outage: The day after
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The three-hour outage in Research in Motion's BlackBerry service has yet to be fully explained, but highlights two old stories: the problems with a single point of failure, and the CrackBerry.
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Research in Motion still doesn&#39;t know why its&#160;BlackBerry service went down for several hours&#160;on Monday.&quot;RIM is continuing to investigate the exact cause&quot; of the outage, the company said in a statement Tuesday. Late Monday, it apologized for any inconvenience caused by the incident, which left customers throughout North America without current e-mail for about three hours starting around 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time.It was the second major outage in less than a year for the popular mobile data service, on which about 12 million subscribers depended at the beginning of last December. The&#160;previous problem, which occurred last April, was caused by a minor software upgrade that went awry, followed by a failed switchover to a backup system, according to RIM. The company said soon afterward that it had identified &quot;certain aspects of its testing, monitoring and recovery processes that will be enhanced&quot; as a result of the failure.BlackBerry e-mail traverses a complex infrastructure involving mobile operator networks, RIM&#39;s network operations center, and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers within companies that use the service. It pushes messages from enterprise e-mail systems, including Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes, out to the popular BlackBerry devices.The system is getting yet more complicated as RIM adds third-party services to appeal to consumers, said Albert Lin, an analyst at investment bank Sooner Cap. As the company tries to keep up with rapid growth in its subscribers -- last year&#39;s fiscal third quarter saw a net gain of 1.65 million -- these types of glitches are to be expected, Lin said.&quot;It&#39;s hard to really expect any major service provider to be 100 percent reliable,&quot; Lin said. Although enterprises now have more push e-mail alternatives than they did when the BlackBerry debuted in 1999, those competitors, such as Visto and Motorola&#39;s Good Technology system, aren&#39;t significantly more dependable, he said.&quot;When it comes to reliable push e-mail ... it&#39;s still hard to find a solution that works better than BlackBerry,&quot; Lin said.
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A few months ago I made a list of all the phone numbers I have. It disturbed me a bit.  I started with the usual trio of home, office, and cell. Then I added a BlackBerry (RIMM) that I use primarily for e-mail, but also the occasional call when my Motorola (MOT) KRZR runs out of power.
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E-mail service of Research In Motion's BlackBerry smartphones experienced a "critical severity outage" on Monday, the company told clients in an e-mail.
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Research In Motion acknowledged an outage left users in the Americas without access to their BlackBerry e-mail service on Monday, but said no messages were lost during the incident.
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Research In Motion said problems with a routine upgrade of an internal system appears to have caused the massive outage that left BlackBerry users without e-mail service for hours on Monday.
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There's a big yellow bar on the Twitter home page today saying it will be down for maintenence betw 10AM and 10PM today. I haven't heard any grumbling about this, but it's worth a bit of a grumble. What other basic form of communication goes down for 12 hours at a time? What if the web went offline for 12 hours at a time? It's unthinkable, because the web is built on the Internet and is decentralized and redundant. A single router or server can go down for a few hours, days or forever, and the web keeps on tickin.  Same with email. If Gmail started having twelve-hour planned outages, as much as I like Gmail, I'd switch. I can't be without email for any extended period of time.  Okay, let's give the guys at Twitter credit -- they stopped being flip about Twitter taking naps or showers. No one likes jokes when a line of communication is down. Now I'd like them to take another step. Assuming these long outages are really necessary, explain to us what they're for. I can take a guess -- something about their database needs changing, and all the data in all the files must be processed to implement the change. Any updates made while such a process is running would be lost, so the server must be shut off. But this is just a guess.  Another guess -- maybe they've hired a scaling expert who needs to make one final major adjustment before these outages are a thing of the past? No one would want to make such a promise, that's offering too much temptation to Dr Murphy, but that would be good news. Maybe Twitter is getting on to solid ground, finally.  It's fairly amazing that there isn't a viable Twitter clone out there yet. I'd also like to see something much more decentralized, based on static files, available to any Twitter-like system. It doesn't seem that far out of reach. With all the scaling troubles Twitter has had it's surprising that there haven't yet been any entrepreneurs willing to enter the space as competition to Twitter.  Users and developers are learning first-hand why centralized systems are so fragile. I'm sure they're doing a heroic job at Twitter, the best they can with what they have, but it's not good enough when the service takes a 12-hour break while many of the humans that depend on it are awake and working.
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The Blackberry wireless device maker is straining to exceed expectations.
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A major service outage afflicted users of the popular BlackBerry smartphones across the United States and Canada on Monday, wireless carriers said.
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Orange data users spend a day disconnected The Orange mobile phone network lost its data connectivity yesterday over most of the country, though the exact scale of the problem remains unknown. Users started losing their GPRS connectivity from about 10.00 in the morning, and network services were only restored in the early hours today â though the cause of the problem remains a mystery.â¦
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InfoWorld - BlackBerry mobile data services were disrupted Monday afternoon due to a problem with Research In Motion's infrastructure, apparently affecting customers of all major North American mobile operators, an AT&T Wireless spokesman said.
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The second major outage of BlackBerry service in less than a year is an embarrassment for Ontario-based Research in Motion, the maker of Blackberry devices.
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Research In Motion's ubiquitous BlackBerry experienced a "critical severity outage" on Monday afternoon that left users stranded without wireless e-mail access, its maker said.
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AT&amp;T&#39;s wireless data networks in the Southeast and Midwest U.S. are down, causing BlackBerry and iPhone users to be without data services.The EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) and UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) services in those regions began having problems around 6:30 a.m. EST this morning, said Mark Siegel, an AT&amp;T spokesman. Voice calling has not been affected, but people trying to use wireless data services might have &quot;difficulty,&quot; he said.Several users of a BlackBerry newsgroup have reported being unable to receive data to their handsets. A systems administrator in Kansas reports that BlackBerry devices there are displaying a message that says &quot;data connection refused.&quot;AT&amp;T is still looking into what exactly caused the failure, but technicians have found a solution to the problem and expect the service to be restored by around 3:30 p.m. EST, Siegel said.The iPhone runs on the EDGE network, so users of the phones, as well as any other mobile device that receives data from either of the networks, will have problems using data services.In early 2007, Research In Motion implemented a software upgrade that caused its systems to crash, resulting in a BlackBerry service outage that started in the evening and lasted through the night. This time, the problem appears to be with AT&amp;T&#39;s network and not with RIM&#39;s infrastructure.
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RIM&#39;s new BlackBerry 7100t phone represents a radical departure from the company&#39;s text-centric roots. Research in Motion&#39;s BlackBerry e-mail devices have gathered a loyal (if relatively small) following, and
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Research in Motion has announced its latest BlackBerry phone, aka the BlackBerry 7100t.ï¿½ The phone isnât due to ship until October and test units are just getting into reviewersâ hands (Iâm waiting for mine right now.
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In light of the recent string of outages of RIM's e-mail system for BlackBerry users, Vodafone UK has announced that it will be using a third party's solution to prevent future BlackBerry outages, and package it as a premium service.