Vodafone goes titsup for BlackBerrys in mobile data outage

BlackBerry users on Vodafone have had another long day, or perhaps a relaxing one, as data services for many users dropped out this morning and are still on the fritz. The outage was caused by a router failure, and hit BlackBerry users on Vodafone's network across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Services are now being …

[Just a geek]

A single router is responsible for that much of a problem? what happened to eliminating single points of failure?

Blackberry, O2, Blackberry again........ not good.

[James 51]

This sounds more like a problem with vodaphone than blackberry.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not great...

What's worse is while my Blackberry has been sullen all morning, Good Technology on my iDevice (and presumably for those users on Android too) has been chiming regularly...

If RIM think managing infrastructure around what used to be their USP they really do seem to have a death wish.

[Anonymous Coward]

vodaphone? server?

that's interesting, our IT team that was tracking this issue and reported it to the rest of the department were told it was due to RIM rolling out a service upgrade. Did seem a strange time of the week to perform a patch/upgrade.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: vodaphone? server?

I'll second this - we were also told it was a RIM issue. Either way, our BB-using clients were generally greeting the news of another outage with resigned sighs, which is never good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: vodaphone? server?

Ditto - Vodafone told us it was a RIM issue. Cue cries of "Give me an iPhone - I'm sick of these BB outages" from our delighted users. Nice tactic to sell the higher profit margin devices maybe?

[Volvic]

Re: vodaphone? server?

Yeah, same here - Vodafone told us that it was a RIM router issue.

I had plenty of people from the business asking us to "escalate within RIM" which kept me entertained all day.

[Prof]

Not seeing any issues on my Voda (BIS) BB today - seems to be working fine.

[Anonymous Coward]

We run a number of BBs on O2 using BES and haven't seen any problems today... annoyingly, I left my personal BB (on Vodafone) at home today so can't compare :-(

[Chemical]

Its nice to find out what the fault was on the old El Reg, having spent most of the morning restarting every server we have trying to restore the service!

[leeph]

Odd

Odd - didn't you think it might be an idea to check with your carrier whether there were any known outages? It's not like there haven't been many recently...

That's the first thing I did (hurray me!).

[Andy 115]

Not a BB user...

But had no Vodafone service all day in office that is usually 2-3 bars Edge...

[Anonymous Coward]

Blackberry down and no one noticed ;)

[Mayhem]

Certainly noticed problems in London

But it only affected 3G & GPRS traffic - wifi traffic worked fine.

[billse10]

Re: Certainly noticed problems in London

me too - switching phone to 2G and back again brought service back, which is just silly.

What was even sillier (and i probably should apologise to vodafone customer services for an email they got) was that while trying to see if there was an issue i was wandering around vodafone's support site, and got a "customer satisfaction survey" popup - which covered the entire screen on phone and meant i couldn't read support page!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lovin' it...!

We just had two of our customers come back to us and ask us to replace their crapberries with Jesus Mobes. Our sales director is a happy man, improved the weekly figures. Thanks Rim and Vodaclone for making him happy!

[Lost In Clouds of Data]

And this is why the DeadPhone will fail

DumbPhones just work because there's bugger all behind them. FeaturePhones work because they're barely more functional than DumbPhones.

SmartPhones (Android, Apple, Windows etc) all work because there's no one single point of failure.

DeadPhones (which used to be known as BlackBerry's) have failed and will continue to fail because RIM wants to run the world.

The new BB10 may be flashy n shiny and smooth n all that good stuff, but it'll just be another hunk of glass and electronics the next time RIM's supply line craps out.

As the phrase goes, 'You can't polish a turd'

Paris - well, because she's like a BB10, quite pretty but functionally obsolete.

[James 100]

Re: And this is why the DeadPhone will fail

Fortunately, this flaw seems to be BB7-specific (and earlier): BB10 finally drops this absurd flaw, switching to the same approach iThings and Android devices have used all along.

Of course, the BB-worshippers who point to the single point of failure as being a "security feature" (instead of a pure encrypted tunnel from handset to mail server, like I have, you put an extra step in the middle and they think this 'helps'!) will need to think up a new line...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmmmm............

Got a txt msg on Wednesday afternoon to say that 'Maintenance' was going to be undertaken on my corporate Blackberry and to try switching it off and on again before calling customer services on the 0333 number if I had any problems.

I did try switching it off and on again (I promise) several times - haven't received an email since Thursday evening - life is good!!!!