RSSRIM blames Monday's BlackBerry outage on a faulty upgrade
By Tim Conneally | Published February 13, 2008, 5:04 PM
Monday's three-hour BlackBerry e-mail outage now has an official excuse from Research In Motion: a software upgrade in its main servers gone horribly wrong.
This explanation should be familiar, as it is the same one BlackBerry users received for a previous outage last April. Since RIM only issues public statements regarding outages upon specific request, according to the New York Times, details of this incident are characteristically vague.
A statement made yesterday attributed this latest mishap to an "internal data routing system...that had recently been upgraded." The upgrade in question, which included a four-hour time slot in the early morning hours on Sunday, took place just hours before the outage.
In a notification on the BlackBerry Outage mailing list, several system upgrades were announced to unspecified hardware components, databases, and admin systems that would affect BlackBerry Relay service.
Because the majority of RIM's 8 million American clients have to route their e-mails through a single datacenter, many have criticized the Canadian company for not opening at least one more to act as a buffer if it plans to remain a "middleman" in the path from sender to recipient.
As the third outage in under a year, the big question on BlackBerry users' minds is: "Will this happen to me every time RIM wants to upgrade?"
Attempts to contact RIM were not answered as of press time.
This is amazing. This company, as big and as smart and as advanced as it is, STILL falls victum to a single point of failure flaw in their system design. Astounding.
Just goes to show you that all the IT guru's and MBA's in the world can still make bonehead, stupid, rookie mistakes that bring the entire company to a screetching halt.
This company got this big and this powerful without realizing you can't allow a single point of failure in your IT infrastructure? Incredible.
The term "egg on your face" doesn't even begin to capture this. I would seriously hope that some very well paid (clearly way overpaid) IT managers got fired from their six figure jobs because of this and learned some VERY valuable network design lessons as a result of this fiasco.
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Big business is going to start requiring SLAs if this keeps up. BB is pretty much a monopoly though since nothing else quite mesures up in the enterprise space. So, not too much leverage available.
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Good Mobile Messaging (recently acquired by Motorola) offers similar functionality on both Palm based and Windows Mobile based devices. We use it and have been very happy with its uptime and feature set. Besides routing mail, calendar items and contacts to the handheld, it offers features for the IT Administrator as well (handset policies, remote wipe, etc...).
Microsoft's ActiveSync has been a competitor in some environments as well. Requiring Exchange (whereas BES and GMM both work with Lotus Domino, Exchange and other products) it does a great job in recent versions of push-sync for mailbox, calendar and contacts. It too works with Windows Mobile and Palm devices.
I think the poster flake is correct that larger customers will start holding RIM to SLA requirements. And for RIM not to have a redundant fail-over datacenter is almost criminal, as many smaller companies in the US that have to be SOX / HIPAA compliant need to tackle these same problems.
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My company has BB users and WM. There is a dramatic shift of users selecting WM over the past year. IF BB has a "monopoly" then it won't last long.
I tried to get an iphone but was laughed at by the people in charge of mobile phones. My HTC Tilt is now on order with WM.
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slackberry!
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