Wednesday, February 13, 2008

RIM Explains BlackBerry Failure


I've refrained from reporting on the major BlackBerry outage that occured on Monday until now, simply because I didn't think it was such a big deal. Systems sometimes fail; things, from time to time, will go wrong. Deal with it, people! But since RIM has finally revealed what the problem was, I figured readers that were affected (or just curious) might want to know.

According to a CityTV report, the outage, which affected about 60% of the BlackBerry user population in North America, was related to an upgrade the company was attempting to make on the device.

With that said, even though we need to learn to live with outages, technical difficulties, and service disruptions, that doesn't mean that we don't get mildly frustrated by it, and understandably so. Have you ever had to go an entire day with no Internet access in the office? I have, and let me tell you, the mood could be summed up in two words: angry and bitter!

This leads to larger issues of network support. Are systems running on threads? Do we run the risk of seeing massive catastrophes if a company relies on one source point to run its entire operations? Sure, most companies have back-ups, and back-up systems for the back-up systems, but exactly how much attention is paid to these back-end systems, ensuring they are working properly, and upgraded accordingly?

It's an issue that any kind of company needs to consider. How strong is your back-up support system?

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