By Steve Ragan Apr 23, 2007, 15:30 GMT
There is lots of talk and debate over the Research in Motion outage that left many BlackBerry owners without service last week. The answers given by the company leaves some confused and others claiming foul. What happened and why? RIM is giving no specific answers, only vague statements from unknown sources.
Is this a cover-up? Is this another PR spin to mitigate public opinion? For example in 2005 early 2006 when the PR department for RIM reported about an alleged ‘workaround’ to offset service loss in the event they lost the lawsuit with NTP. They later settled with NTP and many IT managers with large deployments of BlackBerry devices said, “…it was a bluff that did not work,” according to the Mobile Enterprise blog. There might be some PR spin but not a cover-up.
The outage that started on April 17th was over by mid afternoon on the following day. The problem was not the outage according to Daniel Taylor, of the Mobile Enterprise blog, outages happen, “…especially when you quadruple your customer base over a period of sixteen months,” he says. The problem he has and the problem may others have is the apparent lack of information related to the outage.
There were leaks over the outage in news reports Thursday from unnamed sources, but Taylor points out that most of the reports were hearsay. A fact that is apparently backed up by RIM, there is still no public release on their press website. He also cited three flags, which many in the IT sector and some knowledgeable BlackBerry users agree with.
The updates that led to the outage, took place on a Tuesday evening. Something no IT person will do. Ask anyone who works in IT they will tell you major system updates, such as the RIM update, always take place during off-peak hours and likely over the weekend. If the upgrade was known and scheduled then the PR department at RIM would have known what to address and could have given more information sooner. Instead, no one knows if the upgrade was last minute or if it was planned. These ties in with his third point of no public information on the part of RIM, stating that there are no press statements or, “..No corporate executives on television.”
“Either RIM's NOC is managed by idiots OR RIM's PR department is incompetent OR none of the above. Knowing RIM and knowing their products, the company does not make mistakes like this. Therefore, I'll assume the "none of the above" explanation,” Taylor said.
Much of what could have happened according to his report is unlikely but cannot be dismissed because of the lack of information available to the public from RIM. Security breach, limitations of their platform or NOC problems are all possible, just not likely. The likely cause was someone somewhere screwed up. The doubt would go away if that was the cause and RIM would speak up.
Another point is that there has been no official word, because they are still investigating the cause of the outage. If that were the case, a simple statement would clear that up as well. At any rate, service is restored, and the growing addiction to the BlackBerry can continue with no interruptions.
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