Blackberry Network is Down

Brian writes "According to CNET and others, "A system failure at Research In Motion has affected BlackBerry users in the Western Hemisphere, a news channel reported on its Web site late on Tuesday. The infrastructure failed on Tuesday night, and e-mails were not being delivered to the handheld devices.""

BES users potentially not affected?

[WolfTattoo]

For what its worth, my employer (in Washington D.C.) has their own Blackberry Enterprise Server (an on-site server that interfaces directly with corporate mail systems), and it appears to be unaffected by this outage.

Re:Man, this isn't good for RIM...

[daeg]

They have about a half hour to fix it before the stock market opens. From what I've seen, they've already taken a massive hit. I wonder how much of their gain since Oct 2006 they'll lose (They jumped from around $79 to over $130 in the 4th quarter last year).

They're already down close to $3.60 in pre-market alone. Ouch.

A hundred thousand angry users plus thousands of angry investors? Someone's got a case of the, uh.. Wednesdays.

Re:BES users potentially not affected?

[nherc]

Doesn't BES still have to interface with the RIM network to get the cellular data to the 'net?

Eedundancies and dependencies

[Opportunist]

A single point of failure is always a bad thing. Especially if a lot depends on it. But it can be some cascading effect too, for example power plants running on top output that couldn't swallow the sudden additional load when some parts of the network blew up.

It's a lack of redundancies. Redundancies cost money, and we want everything as cheaply as possible. So no redundancy. But hey, it "works". Usually. The question is, though, can we afford the blackout?

Imagine communication breaking down. No cell, no net, no data transfer, nothing. You could hear commerce grind to a halt. Nothing could be scheduled, nothing could be delivered on time, we'd simply break down. And that scenario isn't as impossible as it seems, because telcos don't have a lot of redundancies in their networks anymore either.

But we're depending on them. Often enough with our very lives. Yet we're not willing to pay the price.

But even if we did, would it be invested? I mean, afaik it's not like RIM made some kind of promise that the service would work. And as long as you can't hold them responsible for the loss, of money and maybe even life, they certainly won't add anything that costs more than it has to.

Re:Crap!

[PinkPanther]

it's their crappy network that is causing their delays!

Being a heavily-addicted user (and admin) myself, I have to say that the VAST majority of the time the RIM network is quite responsive. Often I'll send something to my work account from my gmail account and the browser screen just barely finishes refreshing from clicking "send" and my hip is vibrating from the new love.

Re:Remember POP over TCP/IP ?

[Churla]

This is something which mystifies me...

How does RIM plan on maintaining this behemoth it has created when more smart phones that know how to use TCP/IP are in play and people realize "wait, we can just set up an exchange or IMAP server..."

Is there something THAT magical in their kool-aid?

Re:Not very reassuring.

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, but my scripts don't *telephone* me when one of our servers go down.

Push alternatives ?

[Billsabub]

Has anyone tried the free (as in beer) alternatives to Blackberry for Push email?
For instance this one [consilient.com]
You need a data plan, so not completely free, but it works pretty well for me. Check the list of supported phones before going through the registration though.

Re:Man, this isn't good for RIM...

[jsewell]

Incredible! They were down at the open, but are now UP 5 bucks from yesterday's close! An outage taking out all of North America and the stock is up. Why don't I own some RIMM?