Blackberry Outage

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past few months you will be aware that both BT and Blackberry have had problems with service – more notably Blackberry users losing the ability to browse the net as well as being unable to send and receive emails for 3 days.

For Blackberry the problem was a failure of a “core switch” at their hosting centre in Slough, this resulted in the worst downtime ever for Research in Motion (RIM), the company behind Blackberry. The outage, which lasted 3 days, saw users not being able to access a majority of the services which they rely on the Blackberry for – mainly sending and receiving emails when not in the office or at home. For a company of Blackberry’s size, there are expectations, such as constant uptime and guaranteed levels of service. Now with modern technology we expect that there could be some downtime, but limited to a few minutes or an hour at most… not 3 days! The problem couldn’t have come at a worse time for Blackberry, with fierce competition in the smartphone market from both Apple and Android handsets. The outage caused many people who relied on constant access to emails to look elsewhere.

What both the Blackberry and the BT problems highlight are the need not only for redundant systems but also the need to test them. Now granted this is not always as easy as it sounds, but there should always be a ‘Plan B’, some way of getting systems up and running in the event of a major problem or a disaster recovery situation.

References
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