BlackBerry’s email service decided to go out for lunch yesterday and didn’t come back. By that we mean there was a major BlackBerry outage yesterday and thousands upon thousands of people were without access to their wireless email. Given the crowd of people who typically use it (e.g., businessmen and other professionals), there were a lot of unhappy campers (especially given that this is the 2nd major outage in a years time).
So about that BlackBerry outage… Remember the nickname that has been given to the Blackberry? It’s called the Crackberry because so many people become addicted do the device. What happens to addicts when they’re deprived of what they’re addicted to? They go through withdrawals and that’s exactly what happened to BlackBerry users yesterday. The Associated Press quoted one person saying that everyone was in crisis. They said:
Everyone’s in crisis because they’re all picking away at their BlackBerrys and nothing’s happening. It’s almost like cutting the phone cables or a total collapse in telegraph lines a century ago. It just isolates people in a way that’s quite phenomenal.
Another person, a businessman named Stuart Gold was one of many that was mad about another major outage. He was quoted as saying:
I don’t know what happened, I don’t care what happened. They need to save their excuses for someone who cares.
It’s actually quite amazing what an impact one device can have on the World. This critical outage also had the opposite effect. Besides the upset and angry customers, there were those who took the outage as a welcome break. One man who was quoted by Reuters said his life was easier without it because he didn’t have to worry about replying.
While I’m sure it did most everybody some good to step away from the BlackBerry for just a few hours, the underlying thought here is that RIM needs to make sure a major outage like this does not happen again. People want reliability and in a competitive market, people can leave BlackBerry behind for something that might be more reliable than what they’re currently getting like an iPhone or a Palm device. Oh wait, the iPhone experienced an outage not that long ago too back on January 31st! Is any service reliable these days or are we just expecting too much?
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Tags: Gadgets, iPhone, Smartphones, Wireless
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It always amazes me that people find a service that is down less than 1% of the time to be “unreliable”. I’d say those are pretty good odds given the inherent probabilities of failure within systems as complex as these. Granted, when these systems go down, a large number of people are affected, and there are probably indirect costs associated with the outage. At the same time, it seems to me that the people who get upset over outages like this, need to take a lesson from the providers and build themselves a redundant communications system – whether it’s a cellular modem for their laptop, or finding a wireless hotspot, or just re-prioritizing their tasks until the blackout is over. Of course, I’m one of the ones that would be ecstatic if my cell phone provider had a monthly blackout…
I agree that no system is going to be 100 percent and this outage was minor. My Blackberry did not receive emails for a short period of time and the phone service was not interrupted. I really only need my emails after business hours to keep informed of issues on my network, so my thoughts may be different if the outage occurred during a different time of day.
It was only email service for 3 hours!! You could still make a phone call and text message someone. 3 hours out of 10 months, since the last outage, is 99.958% reliably (7197 divided by 7200 hours). Thats pretty good, my broadband at home goes out more than that.
So perhaps this turns into such a big deal simply because of those who really are addicted to their BlackBerry’s and voice their concerns more publicly?
As spock1982 pointed out this could be a big deal for people who rely on the Internet for getting work done. Maybe some people tether their Blackberry as a modem for their computer, and that could have been a critical three hours for them.
If people were complaining for personal reasons I would say get a life.