BlackBerry Outage Hits Users

[Wretched Excess]

BlackBerry Outage Hits Users

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd experienced a significant outage of its BlackBerry wireless email service on Monday, its second nationwide disruption in the last 12 months.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based company notified its customers of the problem at around 3:20 Eastern time, saying that the outage was affecting about 50% of North America customers across wireless carriers.

RIM didn't return calls seeking comment.

In its notice to customers, RIM said the cause of the outage was "to be determined." It follows a similar outage last April, which was caused by an improperly tested software update at the company's data center that handles BlackBerry email traffic for millions of users.

At the time RIM, warned that its backup systems didn't perform as planned, raising further concerns among customers and investors about whether RIM's infrastructure can keep up with its torrid growth. RIM added 1.65 million subscribers in its quarter ending Dec. 1, 2007, bring its total to 12 million world-wide.

RIM, whose email service is widely relied on by corporations and governments, is uniquely vulnerable to such large-scale outages. All emails sent through its enterprise servers are routed through a network operating center, which has several locations. A breakdown at the network operating center can therefore quickly disrupt service nationwide.

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I knew it.  there was no way the afternoon was that quiet.

[TheSarge]

Two thoughts on this. 

1) The military commanders that are issued Blackberry's must be going nuts right about now.

2) I wonder if the Blackberry outage has anything to do with the DoD employee that got busted in the spy case today.