BlackBerry outage blankets North America
(Another) RIM glitch silences citizen email
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Consumer BlackBerry users across North America endured extended delays in email service earlier today due to some sort of technical glitch in the messaging network run by BlackBerry maker Research in Motion.
According to Bloomberg, the outage hit all consumer BlackBerry users in the US, regardless of carrier, and consumer outages were confirmed by Canadian carrier Rogers Wireless as well. Corporate users were not affected.
A spokeswoman for US carrier Sprint tells CIO Today that the outage was caused by some "routine" RIM maintenance work that occurred at around 2:00 a.m. US Central time on Thursday.
By late morning, users were slowly regaining access. "RIM has isolated and resolved the issue that was impacting some BlackBerry customers earlier this morning," reads a RIM statement. "Some customers may still experience delays as e-mail queues are processed. RIM is continuing to investigate the cause of the issue and apologizes for any inconvenience."
The outage did not affect phone service, web browsing, or text messaging.
Famously, RIM endured a 12-hour email outage in April 2007 and another lengthy outage hit the Canadian outfit in February of last year. ®
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COMMENTS
Not all of North America
Here in Mexico, my BB never stopped getting emails. Or at least, not in normal hours ... I doubt I'd ever be in a hurry to get e-mail at 2 am. Anyway, the only "delayed" email I see was one sent at 3am which arrived at 4am. All those chain-letters and social networking site "updates" still arrived on time.
No big surprise
@Pandy06269: Blackberry makes the devices and they also run the mail servers that handle the "push" traffic (i.e. when you send an email to the address assigned to your Blackberry, such as joebob@tmo.blackberry.net).
On that same note, RIM has always been a little clueless when it comes to properly running a mail server. For example, they had a problem about a year ago (and I'm sure they still do) where they would silently drop all forwarded emails where the original sender was @yahoo.com. If you decide to redirect a copy (M$ Exchange rule) of your incoming email to your @*.blackberry.net address to get them "real time", and the original sender was @yahoo.com, the RIM servers would accept the email, then silently drop it on the floor. After multiple hours on the phone with their clueless "tech support" people, along with countless mail logs proving they accepted the emails, the problem was never fixed (luckily the person experiencing the problem has moved to an iPhone that syncs directly with Exchange).
I personally think it's all a scam to try to force the users to buy their stupid Enterprise Server software.
All Carriers
BlackBerry email is not direct access to your mailbox on the device. Either, for Enterprise, you run a BlackBerry Server against an Exchange, Domino or Groupwise mail system, or, for consumer, you set up a BlackBerry mail account and it accesses your mailboxes and copies mail onto to your device.
Either way the device connects to a RIM controlled server to pass the mail from the mailbox to the device, the same RIM server is used for all carriers in a region.
It would be the North America RIM server that was affected here, so any carrier whose customers, including roamed, would use that server would be affected.
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