BlackBerry BBM, email downed in epic FAIL BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa have been cut off from their online services because of a major fault at Research in Motion (RIM) in Canada. Irate owners haven't been able to get into their emails, browse the web or use the service that is most precious to them – instant messenger BBM. BBM is the major …
It appears that the Slough datacentre is at least partially to blame, as it serves these regions.
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&q=Bath%20Road%20Slough&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=6578l6578l0l6852l1l1l0l0l0l0l125l125l0.1l1l0&safe=on&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl
BlackBerry haven't routed all their traffic through Canada for several years, now.
If my telco only bothered to update twitter to inform me of an outage I would consider it grounds to drop them like a stone.
What is it with these toe rags that dont make the slightest effort to keep their paying customers informed?
They are willing to send me semi-regular texts for customer service surveys but the cnuts can't even make the effort to develop the ability to send semi-selective customer service messages when there's an outage.
Wankers.
/end rant.
The database doesn't happen to be down for scheduled maintenance by the NSA / FBI / MI5 or the Saudi government does it? For the purposes of terrorist / rioter / insurgent / protester detection (delete where appropriate).
Mine's is the grubby one with the G-men hat on top.
But seriously... they seem to have more outages than all the other providers combined!
Ever wonder why most people are dropping blackberrys? Because companies that use their products are sick and tired of getting supports calls because of the crap blackberry service! Since companies are no longer locking employees to blackberrys they can chose a more reliable solution.
I work for one of the main UK mobile phone operators in a call centre, today wasn't much fun! I went for lunch and there was no call queue, but when I came back there was over 500 people phoning up, mainly to ask why their BBM/Blackberry Internet Services weren't working.
The majority of people were just happy to find out it wasn't their problem, that their phone and account was fine, but there was quite a few people who just couldn't grasp the idea that it was the outage wasn't anything to do with us and that it was down to Blackberry and we were at their mercy.
So much face palming today!
The Blackberry experience comes in two flavours, either BIS (Blackberry Internet Service, the consumer option) or BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server, the business solution). Both require Blackberry activation and the additional feature on your phone SIM. On a BB linked to a BES, the device talks to a dedicated server and via that to the company's email server. The BES admin can allow or disallow certain features for individual or groups of phones via updates pushed out from the BES. An admin may disable the ability for a BB user to look at, delete or download service books (take a look under Options, Advanced Options, Service Book and see the services enabled, but do be careful and DON'T try changing them!). In extremis, a BES admin can remotely wipe and disable a phone.
On a BIS phone, there is one big "BES" run by Blackberry themselves for EMEA (IIRC), which acts as a central point of authorisation (it links IMEI numbers to SIM telephones and grants access to the BB email and messenging service). Service books sent out by BB themselves or the operator (Vodaphone, T-mobile, etc) can change the settings that BIS BBs use, such as the internet gateway and DNS. Usually, the first thing an operator or BES admin will ask you to do is delete and then request a new service book. I suspect either BB has inadvertantly sent out a "poisoned" service book to their EMEA BIS customers, or they have lost the authorisation part that links SIM numbers, IMEIs and BB accounts, effectively disabling all those email accounts.
So I guess the switchover to government-owned servers for these regions was not quite as smooth as everyone expected. Why else the outage from the regions where various governments have requested access to the encrypted blackberry comms for almost 2 years now?
Somebody asked how BB messenger or BB email works.
It's simple
Magic.
And that's how you run companies...
Magic and potions...
Oh and govts.... just with guns...
Nothing technical about it at all. In fact if you think technical then you've gotta be stupid.... it's magic, and opinions are what makes the 1's and 0's go smoothly.... including the NHS
If you hyperventilate because a portion of your personal online experience goes AWOL for a bit, then you are psychologically unbalanced and should seek help.
Their family should get them on with Dr. Phil. For the Brits, he's Americas answer to Jonathan Ross, only with infinitely less class.
It seems that so many people spend so much of their lives watching/reading/discussing other peoples lives that they forget they have one, too.
I really do hope he/she gets help.
@David 155: Most traffic from my Blackberry proxies via their server. On the up side I believe this means that everything I do is protected by their encryption if I'm on public wifi or a dodgy mobile network. On the down side, it means I suffer a greater impact if they stuff their server or network infrastructure.
"... due to the upgrade of the BBM backend to handle external Android apps in a few months time..."
Please tell me they didn't... A wise man once told me of system maintenance and DIY, always do major work on Friday night or Saturday morning as you've got the whole weekend to fix it before Monday morning if it all goes horribly wrong.
Does anyone know if this affected BES (Enterprise) customers (who have their own servers) too or was it just BIS (the general public running on RIM's own servers) that got the shaft?
In light of this and other things RIM have done recently... My next stop will be Android.
I've being trying to BBM my girlfriend while she's in Germany for the last 5 days - utterly fucking hopeless, red boxes then all the messages suddenly miraculously appear in one go at 3am. As thats what its normally like when she's across the channel, I'm not sure what the fuss is about - I thought "largely fucked" was the normal state of affairs.
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