BlackBerry Outages Across North America 284
TheHappyMailAdmin writes "BlackBerry service in North America is out: no email, no BB Messenger and no web browsing. Last carrier estimate I got was 24 hours until service will be restored, with others saying they've gotten estimates from support from between 3 hours to 2 days. BES and BIS services are impacted, and it's across all carriers. Bad timing for RIM as people are wrapping up their holiday shopping..." Updated 18:11 GMT by timothy: Reader notheusualsuspect pings with a note that the service has been restored.
Works for me (Score:3, Informative)
I did a test message from/to my BB too.
RTFA
* FINAL UPDATE: Things are back to normal. RIM Statment to follow. ...
Better late than never? (Score:1, Informative)
Damn /. - more and more lately the posts on the site are running days behind in the news. This was reported on Engadget a day and a half ago. Fail.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/22/blackberry-services-down-in-north-america-yet-again/
Nothing is Out or Broken (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Better late than never? (Score:1, Informative)
Slashdot: Bringing you Yesterday's Stories Today!
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SMTP/POP/IMAP (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Central point of failure.. (Score:5, Informative)
In short, if you use your phone for email and dicking around, then the BB is one of the worst smartphones for you... if you are a corporate entity that wants to have certain employees "connected" at all times, then there is no other choice. The only confusing part to me is why people buy themselves a non-corporate blackberry.
According to SANS, you're a little late slashdot.. (Score:1, Informative)
UPDATED 6:00AM CST (bambenek) - It appears Blackberry's network is back up. The outage affected only those applications that needed to go through that network. Native IP was working fine, but seemed to be all providers.
http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7798&rss
Re:Central point of failure.. (Score:5, Informative)
"The only confusing part to me is why people buy themselves a non-corporate blackberry."
Because, as you implied in your post, BlackBerry phones 'just work'. Most of the time.
Push e-mail? A BIS phone works splendidly. BIS handles the actual polling. Even OWA seems to work fo those of us without BB servers at the home office. Ask your favorite Android user how their POP/IMAP email is working. Full disclosure; I am an Android user, G-1 on Donut. iPhone users, I have no idea how you POP mail works, but it can't be too bad or you all would have ditched... wait, nevermind.
Web browsing? Very well done, considering the platform, since your BES is essentially a proxy server that solves some problems and gives you an enhanced experience. BIS does this also, just not as customizable as having a BES of your own.
BIS is a good idea, though it does expose the single-point-of-failure issue. But, consider your cell service in general:
- Most of us forget that the first single-point-of-failure is probably a cell tower. Yep, you might have two or three that can serve you, but if the backhaul from your tower is fritzed, you might have to wait until you get paroled from that tower, and move one to one that isn't hosed.
- The next single-point-of-failure is probably a metro area uplink for your carrier. I don't know for sure, but I suspect redundancy here is not universal.
- God forbid your carrier is architected like T-Mobile, or your single-point-of-failure is either a GSM service that has to be responsive or your phone is doing rock imitations, or a similar CDMA. I hear CDMA doesn't have the same architecture, but if your carrier can't authenticate you to the network, u b hosed.
RIM has had more than its share of outages over the last two years, but they have been notable because of the popularity of the platform. I ditched my BB to try Android. My wife has not been affected by either outage this month - be they natiowide or global or whatever. Her BB Curve hasn't missed a beat. Lucky I guess. And she would not like my G1, or Andriod, at all. Too much fuss. She just wants mail and minimal web when she wants it.
Dump on RIM if you want, but their platform works very well. Outages aside, it is a superior corporate solution, and makes most other platforms look like pants. Wait, are there ANY other corporate platforms?
Re:Central point of failure.. (Score:4, Informative)
BB is essential for cwhoreporate systems, because NO OTHER PHONE ON THE MARKET ANYWHERE matches its functionality... they can issue you a phone, then enforce strong passwords, content filtering, disable cameras so you don't end up sending pictures of your Christmas party indiscretion to your whole team, etc etc. Hell I can see my internal websites (not published to the internets) on my BB because it is basically VPN'd 24x7 to my work network.
Please, don't spread misinformation. Corporate policy management (which includes EVERYTHING you have listed and a lot of other things) has been available for Nokia phones for a long long time.
Re:BLACKBERRY IS US ONLY SO N.A. IS IGNORANT !! (Score:5, Informative)
RIM (the company that runs the BB services) is a Canadian company that operates globally. So the original post is correct in saying North America.
Re:SMTP/POP/IMAP (Score:2, Informative)
so how do you get your email on your phone without opening up the POP and IMAP ports on your firewall? there are only 2 ways for this and that's RIM or Microsoft.
Well if you want to participate in this whole intraweb messaging thing and access your email from someplace other than the console then you probably are going to be opening up those ports.
That said, the value in RIM and Exchange ActiveSync is the sync of contacts and calendars. Something that POP and IMAP can't do.
Re:Central point of failure.. (Score:5, Informative)
As well as the iPhone. I have a handful of corporate iPhone users and can remotely wipe their phones to a clean install from an admin console on our Exchange Server.
No problems with my "Curve" on Verizon.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:SMTP/POP/IMAP (Score:3, Informative)
He is referring to Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync protocol, which runs over https and provides push mail, calendaring, contacts, and has more management features than using IMAP(S) alone. There's no need to use any Microsoft software at all to use the protocol: it's implemented by open source products and by Google.
No need to use any Microsoft software ? Yes. But you need to first licence ActiveSync, see here [microsoft.com] the companies who did it (and probably paid a lot of money to Microsoft). No open source software there.
Using a (proprietary) protocol such as ActiveSync is better than relying on a single point of failure, but using a standards-based protocol would be better.
Re:Works for me (Score:5, Informative)
It sometimes helps to explain to the powers that be with a data flow and connectivity diagram. All Blackberry traffic, especially BES traffic, flows through the Blackberry servers. So the phones are connected first to the carrier, then to the Blackberry servers, then to the BES, then to the company mail server. The company mail server is connected to the BES, which then connects to the Blackberry server network, then to the carrier, then to your phone.
There are pluses and minuses to this arrangement. The big minus is obvious -- when Blackberry has problems, EVERYONE has problems.
Perhaps the outage was shorter than expected. Slashdot news is never "real time" and problems are often solved before the story is ever published here.
Re:Central point of failure.. (Score:5, Informative)
IMAP email (actually, IMAPS) works perfectly on my iPhone.
And S/MIME support?
It might not matter to you or to most home users/teens/hipsters/iPhone users, but S/MIME is damn crucial for a lot of government and enterprise users. The iPhone doesn't support S/MIME, nor does Android, nor does Symbian. There're no third party mail apps for the iPhone (since Apple doesn't allow "duplication of functionality"), and none (that I know of) that provide S/MIME for Android, and definitely none for S/MIME on Symbian (I know because I checked last year when I was forced to use a Symbian phone.)
S/MIME support, along with management of the associated certs, etc. is one thing that BlackBerrys excel at and, like it or not, a reason that a lot of users choose them.
Re:Central point of failure.. (Score:3, Informative)
As well as the iPhone. I have a handful of corporate iPhone users and can remotely wipe their phones to a clean install from an admin console on our Exchange Server.
Not to the same level as BBs (at this point in time):
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/06/iphonesecurity/
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/07/23/iphone-security-broken-business-users-take-note/
While not everyone needs that level of assurance, for those that do, RIM has gone through the effort of getting FIPS and other certifications:
http://na.blackberry.com/eng/ataglance/security/certifications.jsp