RIM was just lucky with cracked Tuesday

RESEARCH IN MOTION (RIM) appears to have been lucky and escaped serious consequences over the failure of its servers in North America on Tuesday night (April 17th).

The company's data centre based in Ontario, Canada seems to have fallen over for around ten hours leaving users of the company's famous 'Crackberry' wondering where all of their email messages had gone.

To be fair, such a failure can hardly be described as unusual. How many corporates haven't experienced the occasional server failure - resulting in the company's email system disappearing for several hours?

RIM's misfortune is that its loss of service was on a much grander scale. Around five million North Americans were affected. Even the White House was caught out.

The most curious aspect to this whole sorry affair was RIM's attitude. There was absolutely no information posted on the company web site to let its customers know what was going on.

Eventually, for the lucky few enough to be on RIM's Press list, the company issued a statement that merely stated, "The root cause is still under review, but service for most customers was restored overnight and RIM is closely monitoring systems in order to maintain normal service levels."

Hardly an apology. What was more astonishing was the general lack of response from industry observers. One so-called expert suggested - hardly credibly - that the outage might help Palm.

The real winners, however, should have been the 'push' email vendors such as Good Technology (recently acquired by Motorola) and Visto.

The pair should have been gloating that such an outage couldn't have happened with their offerings since messages don't get held on a store and forward server as is the case with RIM's product.

Better still, there are ways of ensuring that the corporate email servers never fall over as with the product sold by Neverfail. Ironically, one of its chief current uses is to protect corporate Blackberry BES servers.

What Tuesday 17th should have taught corporate America is that parts of their business have become absolutely dependent on employees being able to access their Blackberries.

And RIM's reaction to Black Tuesday doesn't exactly inspire confidence. µ

See Also
Better optimisation caused RIM's Crackberries to crack
Blackberry goes belly up