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.
The Joke's on RIM (Score:3, Interesting)
My Blackberry has once again broken so I haven't been impacted by this outage. I haven't even had time to set up BB mail on my newest replaced Crapberry.
This is the first and last Blackberry I will ever owned, but because of Blackberry's poor quality, I'm now on my third one. Just trying to survive a 2 year contract on T-Mobile, America's worst cellphone company.
I don't know what phone I get next (Android or iPhone) but I promise I will never own another Blackberry as long as I live.
Re:Central point of failure.. (Score:5, Interesting)
PS. I'm a proud owner of a Droid. Push email works quite well for me on it (directly from my server). I don't see a reason (for me) to switch to Blackberry/RIM). Is there a killer feature/functionality that a BB would give me over the Droid? Is it enough of a reason to add another point of failure in the stack?
Thanks...
Re:Better late than never? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually no, that was a failure of just BIS. This is a bigger failure that affects messenger, BES and BIS.
Re:No, its for being at retail.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll admit that that's become pretty common for shopping in general. My mom is a shopaholic. She hits thrift stores, the Goodwill, yard sales, etc looking for "the deals" (I think Antiques Roadshow did this to her). Generally I just leave her be on that, but she knows that I have things that I like (old guitars, M&M's memorabilia, telescopes, etc). If she finds anything that she thinks I'd find remotely interesting I get a picture message of the item asking if she should buy it.
While I kinda questioned the usefulness of camera phones when they first came out (and still find it hilarious that people were using those 0.3MP phones to take any pictures they want to keep), I must say that being able to instantly show someone an example of an object you're looking at over the phone is a nice thing.
IT Needs to Learn from TV (Score:5, Interesting)
As a TV Master Control honcho in a previous life, I read stuff like this and I shake my head... hours?? DAYS?! In broadcasting, that's not an outage, that's a carefully orchestrated attack by space aliens. Why does anyone on the corporate management level even remotely tolerate this? What, there's not enough money changing hands over at RIM to merit hiring the right professionals and institute the proper safeguards and procedures? The infomercial that aired at 3AM on Channel 11 has a better back-up plan than RIM's entire service? It boggles...
I blame bing! (Score:1, Interesting)
Well I got my BIS service back today, and it looks like they pushed a bing! app out. Coincidence? I think not.
Re:IT Needs to Learn from TV (Score:2, Interesting)
Amen! I am currently working in engineering, keeping master control going at a TV station... And I would have to think real hard to come up with a system here that does not have redundancy built in. If we went off-air for that amount of time, then God himself had better be signing the paperwork! (Even then it may not help!)
Reduction in crashes? (Score:1, Interesting)
I'd love to know if there was a drop in vehicular crashes during the BlackBerry outage.
And yet... (Score:4, Interesting)
And yet strangely I can post this comment from my 'berry.
Re:IT Needs to Learn from TV (Score:2, Interesting)
My local broadcast stations have had a couple of hour plus outages since the DTV transition, so perhaps 'new' has something to do with it (some of them were because they were unhappy with coverage and they upgraded power and changed locations).
Re:No, its for being at retail.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been doing something similar. When I had to go to the hardware store, I'd take a picture of the project and/or the problem and show it to the guy. The first few times, the guy was "wow, good idea taking a pic" but then more people started doing it and it's pretty common now.
[John]
Re:Central point of failure.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I agree with you, and that means the dead of Blackberry.
When people sees it, it looks like a phone, so they assume that they can do the things people do with a phone usually. Shortly after, they find out that this is only useful for work. It means that they are available to their bosses 24x7 and they get none of the fancy gadgets that iphone and Android users have installed on their phones.
When they realize that they would like to have another phone for personal use, they hate the blackberry and resist having one as much as possible.
On the other hand, you have the iphone and Android. People buy them and take them to work. They manage to force the IT department to write stuff for them. There are lots of security issues, but that is what users want.
Now, which one of the two has more future in small/medium companies right now?
And do you think that Blackberry will be able to live if only big enterprises use its terminals?
Re:Central point of failure.. (Score:2, Interesting)
As an interesting side effect, my company gives all primary/secondary on-call folks BB's. They in turn automatically get messaged whenever some process starts failing. This lead to an interesting find last night when our on-call Oracle DBA called in wanting to know why he wasn't getting any BB messages as he found one of our Auth DB's ran out of space and was failing to allow for account changes (passwd changes, account updates, etc) and he never got a message about it. This type of thing is wide spread across the entire company, everyones little app/process/product emails home to their respective BB carrying owners, as well as a laundry list of middle and upper management, and like I said the on-call folks. It seems that our company overly relied on the use of BB when it should have been obvious to also CC these emails to our local NOC in the case of an unthinkable nationwide BB outage. -Anon with good reason.
Re:Central point of failure.. (Score:2, Interesting)
iPhone users, I have no idea how you POP mail works
Works fine.
your BES is essentially a proxy server that solves some problems and gives you an enhanced experience.
What problems? What enhancements? I can browse the Internet on my phone pretty well without any proxy.
Most of us forget that the first single-point-of-failure is probably a cell tower....The next single-point-of-failure is probably a metro area uplink for your carrier....
Yes, there are other points of failure, but that's not really the issue. There are always going to be single-points-of-failure, but you try to minimize the number of them. To add another one unnecessarily is foolish.