Global Outage Frustrates BlackBerry Users
RIM Scrambling to Fix Issue
Talk about kicking a company when it's down. Research in Motion (RIM), makers of the popular BlackBerry smartphone, are scrambling to repair a service outage that has reportedly affected about 10 million users from Africa to Europe to South America.
According to reports, the outage started sometime during Monday's early morning hours (EST). BlackBerry users across Europe, Africa, India, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile have reported being unable to complete calls, send BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) instant messages, access email or browse the Internet.
In a statement released Monday, Research in Motion said it had resolved the problem -- only to find users complain that they were still encountering difficulties accessing services. Upon re-visiting the issue, RIM announced it knew what the issue was, but wasn't yet certain when all services would be fully restored.
"Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested," RIM said. "As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience and we will continue to keep you informed."
Not everyone is prepared to show RIM patience. Twitter users attacked the company for this most recent outage (which, unfortunately, is not the company's first), suggesting they were considering a switch to one of RIM's many competitors -- in particular, iPhone-maker Apple or one of a number of Google Android-based phones.
Even analysts have expressed disappointment with RIM. "RIM has failed again at what plagued them in past outages, which is to provide a comprehensive disaster recovery solution," noted Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney.
It's all badly timed for a Waterloo, Canada-based firm that has been down on its luck of late. Sales of the company's products, particularly new versions of the BlackBerry and the largely-ignored PlayBook tablet, have been very disappointing this past year. In response to these shortfalls, the company was forced to cut several thousand jobs during the summer.
Will this most recent outage result in more cuts? Well, it certainly won't lead to new hires.
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