Yesterday, we reported that RIM’s Blackberry Servers had gone down, sending millions of people across the globe into a frenzy.
RIM had said, “We are working to resolve an issue currently impacting some BlackBerry subscribers in Europe, Middle East and Africa and India. We’re investigating, and we apologize to our customers for any inconvenience caused whilst this is resolved.”
After that, the severs did resume to normal and the world breathed a sigh of relief. However, within a couple of hours, people started getting delayed emails, chats were not consistently going through, and finally the servers crashed again.
For those that do not know, all internet-based data transfers taking place from any BlackBerry device, first go through their servers and then to the other user. This includes email and chats on their popular BlackBerry Messenger. It also means that web-based applications like WhatsApp and the web browser would not work over one’s data plan. It is to be noted that except for the past two days, BlackBerry’s servers are very reliable by the Internet’s standards. Amazon’s Cloud Servers have gone down. Google’s GMail servers have gone down. The last time Blackberry’s servers went down was in 2009.
The official Blackberry Twitter Handle (@Blackberry) and Blackberry India (@BlackberryIN) both posted this message:
“Message delays were caused by a core switch failure in RIM’s infrastructure. Now being resolved. Sorry for inconvenience.”
Hopefully this core switch failure will get resolved soon, but the damage may already be done. Blackberry’s were known for their reliability for business users. This may shatter than impression and make die-hard BlackBerry addicts turn to other options in the market.
However, some users have seen the lighter side of things. Twitter user @anaggh said, “BB Conspiracy Theory: RIM which is ‘Canadah’ based has not declare Diwali Bonus for Indians working for them.” Twitter user @madmanweb said, “RIM to rename its service to BlackAndBlueBerry after the beating it’s taken lately.”
Were you affected by the outage? Did it affect you badly or were you glad for the break from the information overload?
Here is the problem with RIM, the blackberry service is dependent on the state of RIM’s servers in each region, not the carrier. When the RIM servers go down, it will render all blackberry’s useless. It’s not happening for the first time.