Australian IT – BlackBerry down Bruce Meyerson in New York, APRIL 19, 2007
MOST of it happened after hours, but the nature of mobile email meant plenty of dismay as BlackBerry service went down across North America from Tuesday evening to Wednesday morning.
By the time the service sputtered back to life, jamming the handheld devices with a torrent of delayed messages, grumbles had been heard at the highest levels of business and government.
“The sound of BlackBerries being thrown against the desk was deafening for a while,” said Garth Turner, a member of the Canadian Parliament known for his constant internet blogging.
Gee… That’s too bad…
Here in Montreal, Canada, we weren’t affected by this outage.
So it’s only in the States that there are Mysterious eMails Outages…BB…Congress…
Wake up call to RIM. Have better redundancy in your system. More outages like this and big biz will start looking elsewhere(M$) to meet their needs.
Oh man, I enjoyed the silence! My phone was just a phone for awhile. Heaven.
i like how RIMM’s stock price actually went UP 3% today despite the outage. bubble, anyone?
Heh…
As a computer consultant, I have several clients that “depend” on their Blackberry devices. A few called, and asked what they should do — I suggested, “Wait…”
I get the same thing when they lose power during bad storms. One time, I actually was asked this, “All the power’s off, what should we do?” I queried, “How long have they been out?” “Oh, about a half-hour…” (the battery backups had long since neatly shutdown the servers. “The computers aren’t running either, what should we do?”
I offered this, “Well, I know there’s enough light coming in the windows, when was the last time you dusted?”
It gets better… she replied, “That’s a ludicrous suggestion, when will the power be back on?”
I closed the conversation with, “I’m not the power company…”
Some people are thick.
Talk about cranky folks (like Garth Turner, a member of the Canadian Parliament), haven’t they heard of the telephone or -gasp- a Mac or PC? Good Grief, Charlie Brown. What would they do in a national emergency??
Bubba- “What would they do in a national emergency?? Why, wait for the “authorities” to save them silly.
Stupid slaves to a gadget.
Blackberry is nothing more than a yuppie badge, anyway.
Actually, the BlackBerry service is quite reliable.
This is probably a wakeup call for them to add additional backup servers. RIM has probably learned from this.