Cellular10.10.2011

BlackBerry downtime: what you should know

BlackBerry

The prolonged BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) downtime on Monday 10 October left millions of BlackBerry subscribers in Africa, Asia and Europe frustrated.

According to reliable information received by MyBroadband, around 50% of BlackBerry subscribers in the EMEA region were affected by the RIM network problems.

The problems started shortly after 09:00 GMT, and lasted for many hours. Affected subscribers could not send and receive e-mail messages, use services such as Internet browsing or instant messaging.

Furthermore consumers were unable to create new accounts while BlackBerry Enterprise Servers were also unable to connect to BlackBerry’s infrastructure.

The long and short of it is that BlackBerry was basically borked, and RIM did not provide much feedback during the outage.

MyBroadband unsuccessfully tried to get feedback from RIM SA about the outage, but later received the basic statement about the downtime from Research in Motion.

“We are working to resolve an issue currently impacting some BlackBerry subscribers in Europe, Middle East and Africa.  We’re investigating, and we apologise to our customers for any inconvenience caused whilst this is resolved,” said RIM.

The global impact of the latest BlackBerry outage meant that consumers were made aware of the cause of the downtime, but according to a well placed industry source this is by no means an isolated event.

BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) problems are not uncommon in South Africa, and consumers typically blame their cellular provider (Vodacom or MTN) for the downtime.

What consumers do not know is that a large percentage of the issues are caused by problems on the Research in Motion (RIM) network, and not the local cellular network.

The absence of publically available information about BlackBerry network problems means that the cellular operators may continue to suffer reputation damage while RIM is actually to blame.

Related article: BlackBerry Internet Service problems

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