Blackberry outage takes the pip

THERE WAS much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth yesterday after Research In Motion's Blackberry network crashed and burned throughout Canada and the US.

RIM managed to email its biggest clients but, as is the way of things, ordinary people only knew the system was borked.

In what was officially described as a "critical severity outage" Rim support confessed that the entire network infrastructure had gone tits up.

No one was saying what the cause was, or when it might be restored. An hour after the notification some punters started to receive email, but some didn't get any for some hours.

Last April, a massive outage crashed Blackberry services across North America. At the time Co-CEO Jim Balsillie told the world plus dog that such incidents were "very rare" and the outfit had taken steps to prevent such an outage from happening again. It looks like someone took the wrong steps, the sort of steps that lead to a broom closet and a dead end.

Reuters dug up an analyst Carmi Levy, senior vice-president of strategic consulting at AR Communications to warn that if problems like this become routine, they can turn customers and prospective buyers away.

He said that huge pendulous outages could be "a major Achilles' heel" for RIM.

More here. µ