Anyone on a BlackBerry will have noticed a few… irregularities in their e-mail delivery over the last couple of days. Two (some say three) separate data outages across North America have have rendered BlackBerrys as unresponsive and frustrating as their owners usually are at the dinner table. All data to and from BlackBerrys is routed through RIM’s central servers in Waterloo, Ontario, so if anything goes wrong there, the problem quickly spreads to end-users. The first interruption affected BIS customers worldwide last Wednesday, resolving sometime the next day. The latest one just got tidied up last night and was due to a BlackBerry Messenger flaw, for which a patch has been delivered. Hit up blackberry.com/messenger to upgrade to 5.0.0.57 if you haven’t already.
One outage is forgivable – hey, BIS blackouts have happened often enough in the last year that they aren’t entirely unexpected. A second one would just be a little aggravating if it didn’t take place just seven days after the first, but when it does, it’s hard not to glance longingly at other smartphones that aren’t anchored to a bloated, overburdened backend. Of course, many enterprise users are shackled to BlackBerry out of necessity, and it would take many more outages than this to get their CIO to ignore the 99% of the time e-mail pushes out without issue. The added security of an enterprise server helps, too, but RIM’s growing consumer segment (the one that suffers the most from BIS outages) does have a choice, and is a lot less patient. Though not quite as efficient, there are some very tempting smartphone alternatives out there that handle e-mail adequately, which is just fine for the casual user who doesn’t live and die by the inbox. Service interruptions like this are just the queue they need to switch.
In any case, is anyone still hurting from this BBM outage?
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