Millions of Americans woke up to no RIM Blackberry service today.
In its third day straight of outages, a core switch failure in Southeast England has led to a global messaging and email backlog on RIM servers running Blackberry causing user messaging, email and all data services to ground to a halt. The outage began in Asia three days ago and has been spreading since.
According to RIM’s chronology of the outages, they began on Monday, affecting browsing and messaging services in parts of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. A pair of RBC analysts told Reuters that up to 35 million users outside the Americas could be affected.
This morning the company updated the page to reflect reports that the outage is now affecting users in the Americas.
RIM says the issue is an internal technical failure. Earlier on their Facebook page the company posted the following statement:
The messaging and browsing delays being experienced by BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina 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 apologize for any inconvenience, and we will continue to keep you informed.
Blackberry claims users in 175 countries on almost 600 carriers worldwide, with over 35 million users of its Blackberry Messenger service. The vast majority of Fortune 500 companies use BlackBerry’s services.
7 Comments
Leave a Reply
Leave a Reply
Techno Sage
Wow, a three day outage! If I caused that I would get fired. What does that say for RIM?
Steve Krause
Yeah… I have a feeling a few people are updating resumes. It appeared to be a hardware failure. Very sad…
shockersh
People are still using RIM? Time to cut the cord on 1995 technology people.
Carl
I just the received the following broadcast on my BB from BB:
This is the real broadcast from Blackberry© All rights reserved.
Broadcast this message to every single contact on your BBM© to reset your display picture, sorry for any inconvenience.
This message is to inform all of our users, that our servers have recently been really full, so we are asking for your help to fix this problem. We need our active users to re-send this message to everyone on your contact list in order to confirm our active users that use BlackBerry Messenger, if you do not send this message to all your BlackBerry Messenger contacts then your account will remain inactive with the consequence of losing all your contacts
Symbol will automatic update in your ,when you broadcast this message. Your blackberry will be updated within 24 hours it will have a new lay out and a new color for chat.
Dear Blackberry users, We are going to do a update for bbm from 11pm till 5am this today. You if you don’t send this to all your contacts your update will be cancelled and you would not be allowed to chat with your contacts as you have the old version
Sent from my BlackBerry® Smartphone, from Etisalat. Enjoy high speed internet service with Etisalat easy net, available at all our experience centres
Carl
By the way i am based in Africa
Techno Sage
Latest update from Mike Lazaridis – founder of RIM
http://www.rim.com/newsroom/service-update.shtml
Wow, they make you register to view their latest press release? :(
Steve Krause
Yeah I hit that as well trying to read that latest update. Nah… don’t feel like registering on your site RIM. Sorry…