{"id":2725,"date":"2011-10-15T05:34:37","date_gmt":"2011-10-15T09:34:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/?p=2725"},"modified":"2021-10-19T06:48:31","modified_gmt":"2021-10-19T10:48:31","slug":"the-blackberry-outage-critical-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webhostinggeeks.com\/blog\/the-blackberry-outage-critical-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"The BlackBerry outage \u2013 How Critical Was the Failure?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Was it just a few years ago that BlackBerry<\/a> got the kind of endorsement that marketers dream at night of?\u00a0 Then-candidate for President Barack Obama revealed that even he had fallen for the allure of the \u201cCrackberry.\u201d\u00a0 Estimates are that the company made another $25-$50 million just on that word alone.\u00a0 There had to have been some legendary parties when that news came out.<\/p>\n

Since then the BlackBerry’s fortunes haven’t been much better than Obama’s.\u00a0 It was already struggling to maintain relevance before this week.\u00a0 Then the Great BlackBerry Outage hit.\u00a0 Word started coming in from Europe, the Middle East and Africa that users’ messages and emails weren’t going out.\u00a0\u00a0 Research In Motion<\/a> (RIM), makers of the BlackBerry OS, acknowledged the problem and pinpointed its source, but were not able to stop users in Canada and US from getting hit next as well.<\/p>\n

What got hit hardest, though, was the reputation of the BlackBerry itself.\u00a0 Now with a tablet and smart phone world that is bursting with alternatives, the question comes: is it time to move on from the BlackBerry, or is this just a series of nasty bumps that loyal users will be rewarded for seeing them through?<\/p>\n

Putting the outage into context<\/strong><\/p>\n

This wasn’t the greatest year for BlackBerry to start out.\u00a0 What was once their market to lose is now the market they’re starting to lose.\u00a0 While 2010 sales were strong, the iPad series alone seized a sizable chunk of the BlackBerry’s user share.\u00a0 These devices brought with them a parade of competitors that further squeezed the former king of portable devices into a defensive corner.<\/p>\n

To try to keep up with the iJones’s, BlackBerry is attempting to reposition itself with its own Playbook tablet.\u00a0 Supplanting the BlackBerry OS in the new device will be QNX<\/a>, a Unix-based operating system that BlackBerry says will take over its handheld market as well as of the BlackBerry 8.\u00a0 RIM is supporting all of these changes with a developer conference next week.\u00a0 A feeling of \u201cbetting the farm\u201d is setting in with all of this, and with some of the accompanying headlines, there is a growing concern that this may not be a winning bet.<\/p>\n

The technical side<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let’s get away from economic commentary and examine the actual problem.\u00a0 Not much information has been released just yet.\u00a0 What we do know is that within RIM’s infrastructure a core switch failed.\u00a0 This happens all the time: what usually doesn’t happen is redundant backup systems not kicking in like expected.\u00a0 RIM routes all of its customer traffic through BlackBerry servers.\u00a0 This centralization provides a high level of security, one of the BlackBerry line’s main selling points.\u00a0 You don’t exactly want the president’s emails peeked at.\u00a0\u00a0 It also creates a single point of failure.\u00a0 Even with this single point having its own backups within it, it proved to be too much of a technical bottleneck.<\/p>\n

Once the breakdown occurred, a spectacular backlog of data started to pile up.\u00a0 It’s believed that this is why the problem eventually spread to the Americas, though no solid information has confirmed this.\u00a0 As of this writing the problem appears to be subsiding, but this is also not confirmed.\u00a0 Research In Motion co-CEO Mike Lazaridis posted a 2-minute video apologizing for the outage.\u00a0 He explained in it that he wished he had more information, but that he would continue to communicate as the problem got resolved.\u00a0 It was a honest, honorable response to the situation that offered no excuses, but that simultaneously confirmed that the problem was serious.<\/p>\n