BlackBerry takes Monday afternoon off
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Second outage in a year BlackBerry users got some time yesterday to smell the flowers and talk to their families and friends - the company's email servers went down just after 3pm Eastern Standard Time.â¦
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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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Sorry, Blackberry. Anything you can do they can do better.
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Do your employees have a "Crackberry" problem? Their compulsive BlackBerry monitoring could backfire on you: Checking e-mail via BlackBerry gives employees a sense of control but leads to more stress, according to a recent study from the MIT Sloan School of Management that examined BlackBerry use and organizational behavior. And this problem starts at the top.
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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   said on Tuesday it is too soon to determine the cause of a  massive BlackBerry service outage that left subscribers across  the Americas with spotty or non-existent access to wireless  e-mail for about three hours on Monday.
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US holiday travelers hoping to get back in the air after a weekend of flight cancellations due to computer malfunctions and staff shortages still faced difficulties getting to their destinations on Monday.
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Haven't we heard that before? A three-hour outage that left many BlackBerry users unable to send and receive email was the result of an upgrade gone wrong.â¦
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A major outage hit BlackBerry users in  North America on Monday afternoon, cutting off wireless e-mail  for everyone from busy executives to political campaign staff  on the eve of three U.S. presidential primaries.
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The second lengthy&#160;BlackBerry outage&#160;in less than a year has one consulting company advising clients not to rely solely on the popular smart phones for critical e-mail messages.Enterprises that really need e-mail responses in less than eight hours to run their businesses should have a backup for the BlackBerry, Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney said Tuesday, in the wake of a crash that lasted about three hours on Monday. They should also set up an independent system to notify them whether an important contact has received or replied to an e-mail message, Dulaney said.Late Tuesday, RIM said the outage was caused by a problem with an internal data routing system in the BlackBerry service infrastructure that had recently been upgraded. That upgrade was part of an ongoing expansion of the network, and this type of change had been done previously with no problems, it said.Monday&#39;s failure followed&#160;a longer outage in April 2007&#160;that RIM attributed to a problem with a minor software upgrade and a subsequent glitch in a failover process.There are about 12 million BlackBerry users worldwide, on a variety of mobile carriers. The crash Monday affected users throughout the U.S. and Canada, preventing them from sending or receiving e-mail or carrying out some other functions, though&#160;no messages were permanently lost, according to RIM.Gartner&#39;s Dulaney had harsh words for RIM, saying he had given the company a break after last year&#39;s failure.&quot;This does not appear to be a mission-critical system with the highest service-level agreements, and therefore, to entrust ... that a message will get to the end point is being a bit foolhardy,&quot; Dulaney said. He advises enterprises that are worried about dependability to ask RIM for details of its backup system and make their own decisions.After last year&#39;s outage, RIM said it would enhance aspects of its testing, monitoring and recovery processes.&quot;RIM has made significant investments to improve its system recovery infrastructure and processes over the last year, which enabled service levels to return to normal quickly,&quot; the company said Tuesday.&quot;They obviously didn&#39;t do as deep a dive as they needed to on disaster recovery issues,&quot; Dulaney said. But he acknowledged the failure could have been caused by something completely unexpected.The BlackBerry, which RIM introduced in 1999, quickly became the most popular tool for mobile &quot;push&quot; e-mail that automatically comes to a portable device with a wireless network connection. All current BlackBerry models are also phones, and the company now offers a wide variety of handsets with consumer-oriented features such as cameras, Web browsers and social-networking capabilities. But to get to and from the handhelds, e-mail messages traverse a complex system involving mobile operator networks, RIM&#39;s network operation centers and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers within companies.Adding consumer features and keeping up with rapid customer growth, such as adding 1.65 million users in the quarter ended last Dec. 1, have probably made it harder for RIM to keep its network running smoothly, said Albert Lin, an analyst at investment bank Sooner Cap. But users accept some level of risk if they want such complex services at reasonable prices, he said. The only truly reliable system is the public switched telephone network, and it has limited functionality, Lin 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.Gartner&#39;s Dulaney acknowledged that competitors, such as Visto and Good Technology (now owned by Motorola), are probably not significantly more dependable.It wouldn&#39;t be impossible to make the RIM network more reliable, the analysts said.&quot;They have the technical capability to spend more and make it more reliable, but is that what their owners and shareholders really want?&quot; Lin said.Google, for example, has a more highly distributed network, but that would take money and time, and many customers wouldn&#39;t want to pay for it, Dulaney said. In the future, RIM may choose to create a higher-end service with greater service assurances and a higher price, he said.
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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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NEW YORK -- An outage has disconnected BlackBerry smart phones across North America.
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AT&T will begin offering the first Wi-Fi and cellular BlackBerry tomorrow with the BlackBerry 8820.
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A major service outage afflicted users of the popular, addictive BlackBerry smart phones across the United States and Canada on Monday.
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Enter 'GoogleBerry' -- A a free download from Google lets BlackBerry users sync up with Google Calendar.
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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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Monday's three-hour BlackBerry e-mail outage now has an official excuse from Research In Motion: a software upgrade in its main servers gone horribly wrong.