RIM restores BlackBerry service11 October 2011
20-hour email and BBM outage finally over for users
Had a mobile nightmare yesterday? That probably means you are a BlackBerry owner, with the company suffering one of its longest outages, which lasted up to 20 hours for some users.
However, all seems to be fine now, with a company statement saying: 'Yesterday, some BlackBerry subscribers in the EMEA region experienced delays with BlackBerry services. The issue was resolved and services are operating normally.'
The service went down around 11am, hitting both email and BBM services. The problem was thought to be down to a server in Slough, a server that covered the previously mentioned EMEA region, which in plain English is Europe, the Middle East and Africa. However, there was talk of the main company server in Canada also having problems too.
BlackBerry systems receive and send emails and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) communications via encrypted connections to RIM servers located around the world. The Guardian<
em> claims a discussion with a former employee indicates a growing problem with the company's servers to handle these communications as customer numbers have increased – nearly tenfold since 2007.
'They didn't start looking at scalability until about 2007, when they had around 8m active devices,' the former employee said: 'The attitude was, 'We're going to grow and grow but making sure our infrastructure can support it isn't a priority.' They have their own clunky infrastructure to do something that you don't really need a clunky infrastructure to do anymore.'
If that is the case, let's hope that yesterday's episode is a bit of a wake up call for RIM.
For up to date PAC Code news
Sign up to our newsletter!
