{"id":35904,"date":"2011-10-12T13:24:01","date_gmt":"2011-10-12T11:24:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=35904"},"modified":"2011-10-13T08:51:06","modified_gmt":"2011-10-13T06:51:06","slug":"blackberry-bleep-remains-quiet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/cellular\/35904-blackberry-bleep-remains-quiet.html","title":{"rendered":"BlackBerry beep remains quiet"},"content":{"rendered":"

The distinctive Blackberry<\/a> messenger bleep remained mute for most of Wednesday morning.<\/p>\n

A tweet from BlackBerry said a core switch failure was behind the popular messaging devices’ silencing.<\/p>\n

“Message delays were caused by a core switch failure in RIM’s<\/a> infrastructure. Now being resolved. Sorry for inconvenience,” the brief message on Twitter read.<\/p>\n

According to reports, the failure affected the service’s Europe, Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina services.<\/p>\n

“It’s the worst nightmare situation. The initial system failed and the back up failed,” Mvelase Peppetta, staff writer for technology analysts Memeburn explained.<\/p>\n

But, said Peppetta: “They are slowly but surely bringing back services.”<\/p>\n

The outage cut around two million users in South Africa from their facebook, internet and e-mail connections, in addition to the popular free messaging service.<\/p>\n

The phone dialling and SMS services remained active.<\/p>\n

The system crashed on Monday, but was later restored, only to falter again on Tuesday afternoon.<\/p>\n

Peppetta said many once-loyal Blackberry users, like himself, were seriously considering moving to phones with other operating systems.<\/p>\n

“It been very much of a lesson on how much South Africans rely on mobiles to access the internet.”<\/p>\n

Arthur Goldstuck<\/a>, head of technology researchers World Wide Worx<\/a> described the past few days as: “A wake up call about being dependent on one device or service for connectivity.<\/p>\n

“When we are dependent on the internet, any outage can have a major impact on work and social life. And when it’s a long outage, it’s going to have a major impact.”<\/p>\n

Blackberry accounted for about 70 percent of the smart phones in South Africa, with Samsung<\/a> and Nokia<\/a> trailing, he said.<\/p>\n

But, for Goldstuck, the biggest issue with the outage was Blackberry’s failure to tell its users what was happening.<\/p>\n

“It’s become a de facto standard and with a user base of that size, you simply cannot mess around with it,” he said.<\/p>\n

Blackberry and Research in Motion (RIM), the companies that operate the systems, failed in not being available and only issuing “the briefest” of statements on their problems.<\/p>\n

He compared this with a Vodacom<\/a> outage in South Africa this year, where the company CEO Pieter Uys<\/a> was on the frontline keeping users updated and commenting on the emergency repairs they had to carry out.<\/p>\n

Goldstuck did not hold the local management of Blackberry responsible, saying it was under strict control of the United Kingdom office.<\/p>\n

Goldstuck predicted the crisis would probably spell the end of the company’s leadership, which had been pressured to change for some time.<\/p>\n

Blackberry<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The distinctive Blackberry messenger bleep remained mute for most of Wednesday morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":35830,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[36,97,5628,99],"class_list":["post-35904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cellular","tag-active","tag-blackberry","tag-mvelase-peppetta","tag-rim"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35904"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35904"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35906,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35904\/revisions\/35906"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}