BlackBerries not on BES conversely needed BIZ. The outage was devastating.
As I pointed out, the majority of their users were completely unaffected. Of those who were, most were out for less than a day. I should also point out, that many of those affected only experienced slowdowns.
iPhone works fine without Apple servers
The same was true for the Great BlackBerry Outage. The phone still functioned as a phone, as did apps. Messaging (Email and BBM) were really the only services significantly impacted, though every message was ultimately delivered. (The same can not be said for their competition.)
The infamous BlackBerry outage as really very similar to Apples MobileMe outage -- except it was significantly shorter and impacted a significantly smaller portion of their users. Well, and RIM didn't drop a single message -- I can't stress how important that fact is in terms of reliability.
The points? The "BlackBerry is unreliable" bit is absurd as they're dramatically more reliable than the competition. Your carrier is much more likely to be down than BlackBerry. Other companies regularly experience outages far worse and far more frequently than BlackBerry, yet still maintain a reputation for reliability.
There isn't much to argue about here. I contend that the outage hurt RIM far more than similar outages hurt other companies simply because of their absurd reliability. When they have an outage, it's big news. When Apple, Google, etc. have an outage, it's not surprising in the least and thus gets far less press coverage, if it's reported in the media at all.