For many users, the outage represented a nightmare: It’s not for nothing that the Blackberry is known by its most ardent fans as the ‘CrackBerry’. For email addicts, the mobile device means uninterrupted, on-the-go email 24/7.
And there were some lessons in crisis management for RIM. The service went don for 24 hours last week, and it took the company two days to respond publicly to the outage in any way. Its customers, meanwhile, were left to climb the walls and tear their hair out as email anxiety set in.
RIM co-chief executive Jim Balsillie says the company is now working to make sure the outage never happens again. He said the company took a while to respond publicly because it was focused on remedying the problem.
Ultimately, the company announced the outage had been caused by the addition of a new storage feature to the service that had not been adequately tested.
Mr Balsillie said the outage like the one experienced at RIM were “very rare” these daya in the context of modern software platforms and said it was extremely unlikely to happen again.
“It wasn't a capacity issue, it wasn't a security issue. It was an outage overnight when there was an upgrade,” he said.
“I think it's pretty likely that the systems are in place that this kind of thing, as incredibly unlikely as it is to happen, is all the more unlikely to happen again,” he said.
There are about 8 million subscribers to the mobile email service in the US, with one million users added in the first quarter. The company expects to add more than million additional users in the three months to he start of June.
BlackBerry-based mobile email is marketed in Australia by Telstra Mobile, which was not affected by the outage.
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