It’s been a bad week for Research in Motion. And the issues are not even over yet. The company’s BlackBerry platform experienced an outage on Monday that disrupted the service for users in users in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and India. Yesterday, when everyone expected the outage to be fixed, it spread to Latin America.
As users on the four continents lash back at the company, RIM has tried explaining and apologizing for the outage through various platforms including Twitter and Facebook. Earlier today, the BlackBerry South Africa Facebook page carried a message RIM has issued over the outage:
The messaging and browsing delays that some of you are still experiencing were caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure. Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested. As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused to many of you and we will continue to keep you informed.
The message curiously doesn’t mention when normal services will be restored.
BlackBerry is currently facing stiff competition globally from Apple’s iPhone and Google Android powered smartphones. Both platforms are now eating away at RIM’s market share especially in traditional strongholds like North America.
BlackBerry is associated with cheap Internet, cheap messaging and tight encryption of messages on its platform. The cheap messaging and Internet has been a huge hit in Africa especially in South Africa where BBM is popular with young people.
In Zimbabwe, BlackBerry services are not available. The largest mobile operator in Zimbabwe, Econet, is ready to launch but POTRAZ (the telecoms regulator) has stopped it, citing the need for a BlackBerry specific license to be put in place first.
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9 comments
BBOS is 2 centuries behind. IOS is a century. Enter the Android OS. Get with the program people. What do you expect when everything is centralized? Hard to imagine there are/is no redundancy setup in their whole infrastructure. Typical monopolistic attitude..oh yay!
Sirius u ain’t serious! iOS is a century away from Android???
Android OS is all good but its the worst security-wise. Most apps on the Android platform are not secure and they just put you at risk
Anyone who says Android is better than iOS is seriously delusional. I can understand the WANT of an open-source fanboy for it to be better, like we WANT to say Ubuntu is better than Windows … but be honest.
iOS is the gold standard, and Android is just a mish-mash playing catch-up. Maybe one day it will be better, but come on. Don’t be silly.
Wil they days we lost be refunded back to us. The outage has been on for 3 days now…
Ndakambozvireva, l said so. How does power outage in UK, Slough l think, affect all bbs on all continents? RIM gave UK gvt (GCHQ??) a freehand to monitor bbs thus why the need to have all servers, and they denied everyone else!
To all my Blackberry messenger users please feel free to Download Ribe
http://www.ribe.co.zw you can chat to your Ribe, Facebook, Googletalk, MSN,
Yahoo contacts and you can tweet.