What’s the phrase? Oh, yeah: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. BlackBerry went down yesterday across North and South America. Users couldn’t send or receive e-mail, and some complained that they couldn’t connect to the Internet. It’s the second time in a week that BlackBerry has failed. Considering how important the service is to some people—I dare you to go to Wall Street and not see everyone using the device—you really do wonder: how long will people tolerate this shoddy service? It also raises the related question of, How wise is it to rely on “the cloud” to host all of your important data? Surely you wouldn’t leave “mission critical” information in the hands of someone else, someone who’s unsettling opaque when it comes to explaining outages?
Before we get into this, here’s RIM statement about this latest bit of downtime:
A service interruption occurred Tuesday that affected BlackBerry customers in the Americas. Message delivery was delayed or intermittent during the service interruption. Phone service and SMS services on BlackBerry smartphones were unaffected. Root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure. RIM has taken corrective action to restore service.
RIM has also provided a new version of BlackBerry Messenger (version 5.0.0.57) and is encouraging anyone who downloaded or upgraded BlackBerry Messenger since December 14th to upgrade to this latest version which resolves the issue. RIM continues to monitor its systems to maintain normal service levels and apologizes for any inconvenience to customers.
I’ve never had an important thing to do in my life (clearly), so I’ve never really needed the BlackBerry’s always-on e-mail capability. I’ve never had a job on the line, or a fancy business account at stake, at that beck and call of RIM’s servers. So I read these “BlackBerry down~!” stories like you read international news: interesting to a degree, but nothing that’s going to upset the carefully choreographed rhythm of my day.
That’s not to say I don’t rely on services that I have zero control over. I use Gmail for both personal and professional (if that’s the word to use!) e-mail. If a tornado rips through Google’s servers I’m pretty much doomed. I play World of Warcraft for many, many hours per week. If Blizzard’s servers mysteriously vanished my playtime would have all been in vain. I listen to music now on Spotify (in fact, I haven’t downloaded an album in several months because of Spotify). What happens if aliens invade, shooting a death ray at the Spotify servers? There’s goes my music “collection”!
The point is, it’s hard not to run into, and use on a daily basis, services that you have very little control over. How many people do you know who run their own e-mail server? Who has backups of all the photos they store on Flickr or Facebook?
I know it’s not the same, but this latest BlackBerry outage does highlight my concern with everything moving to “the cloud.” Like I said, I haven’t downloaded an album in months because of Spotify, but what if the record labels suddenly decide to revoke their support? How is that any more wise than buying a cheap hard drive then stuffing it with MP3s and FLACs? Then buy a backup hard drive.
I guess this makes a cloud skeptic. (Incidentally, while my fellow CrunchGear writers will be at CES clutching to their phone to see their Google Calendar schedule, at the mercy of the wireless networks in Las Vegas, I’ll be walking around with a pen and a piece of paper stuffed into my wallet with a list of all of my meetings. A piece of paper won’t crash, and if AT&T dies in Las Vegas that week, and I fully expect that it will given all the iPhones that will be crawling up and down The Strip, I’ll be skipping along with everything I need in my pocket. It’s sorta like Steampunk, just not stupid.)
So as RIM gets BlackBerry up and running (to be fair, everything looks to be running just fine as of this writing), you do wonder how long people will continue to passively allow this to happen to them. What are you going to do the next time an outage happens, tweet your displeasure to the world? Provided Twitter itself isn’t down, of course.
Nicholas,
Have you ever used a Blackberry?
My BlackBerry went down, and I enjoyed it.
Greatly.
I sat in bed last night wondering what to do now that I can’t check my email and surf the web before I go to sleep… Then I noticed that the Amazon app was still working and I bought a book. Too bad it won’t get here until Monday.
Then I actually went to bed early and got to work at a reasonable hour. Nice.
Thanks BB!
It stopped me buying full stop.
Read Nicholas Carr’s book, The Big Switch. People used to generate their own electricity and pump their own water from their own wells.
Electricity is now a public utility (that sometimes fails when a tree falls down on a power line), as is municipal water (that sometimes fails when water mains break).
I don’t run out and by a diesel generator when my power shuts off twice a year because of a storm, and I don’t have the urge to dig a well and install a pump when we’re asked to conserve water from a water main break.
When BlackBerry goes down, I can get my e-mail from GMail.com or Outlook Web Access; I can send my BlackBerry Messenger friends an SMS text message. We have many channels at our disposal to work around any outage.
Agreed, putting all your eggs in one basket is never prudent. But Cloud or No-Cloud, all systems will fail at some point. BlackBerry did well enough for me for the other 8,752 hours this year that it did work, that I will accept the 8 hours this year that it did not. YMMV.
typo, “buy a diesel generator” not “by a diesel…”
A bit hysterical, Nicholas. Just because BB servers went down twice in a very short time (inconvenient, yes, but hardly the end of my business), it doesn’t mean the platform is useless. I’ve had a BB for about 4 years and this has happened maybe… what, 5 times in total? So once a year on average. You’re a young man, or so it seems. I’m old enough to be f**king amazed that this stuff all works as well as it does.
The big giveaway about Blackberries? All my buddies have kids that are in their mid-teens. Guess which way the majority of them are switching? Yes, that’s right, from iPhone to Blackberry. This is apparently because of the ease of MMS, and the fact that the iPhone is seen as passe, and something of a fad. By these 14 year-old kids.
Kind of makes you wonder whether the peak of the iPhone craze is right now.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… shame on you again. I’m on a 2 year contract, where do I think I’m going??
Nowhere by the sounds of it.
Seriously, name a commercial mobile e-mail service with fewer outages than Blackberry’s if you can.
A cellphone outage causes hypoxia and dogs cause global warming: http://hoboken411.com/archives/34269
Maybe you should write the same article for the iPhone and all the dropped calls people experience? What an exaggerated article.
In the 3 years of owning a Blackberry i cant ever remember a time where i thought ‘**** this service, im dead in the water when this happens!’
Service failures just happen. Twice in a week looks more like they are still trying to fix the same issue than two really unrelated events… They have restored the servers, launched a new messenger (in no-time I would say) whose behaviour appeared to be the cause of the failure…
I would be quite satisfied with RIM.
Please, try to list the “options” comparing the real business services offered and doing a statistics of their failures… and in the end I think you will stick with RIM too… that’s if you need a business level service… otherwise you can always play with thousands of apps on your iPhone, which is still an options to kill some time if you have no business… know yourself.
At my last company, whenever we had an outage either with Blackberries or Internet or landlines, anything communication-related basically, the rank and file and even some in management would suddenly get in a good mood and go out to lunch for the rest of the day as if they were kids getting ready to go to school and finding out it’s a snow day.
Parenthetically, we went bankrupt in June.
“I play World of Warcraft for many, many hours per week.”
I lol’d at that.
So, this outage stuff … when did that started happening? That’s not what we pay for dammit! How hard is it to keep your service up 100% of the time? I mean really …
“I play World of Warcraft for many, many hours per week.”
I lol’d again.
Paper weight mode dude…
Paper weight mode
In all honesty (I don’t own a BB) I think its a bit unfair to synonymize the cloud with BBs.
I think it is “Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
HAHA… you beat me too it!
I think the blackberry is the best phone. Its so easy to use and you can’t beat the keyboard on all their phones. For business related use this phone is definitely unbeatable. I think the future apps will play a huge factor in keeping their customers.
good read thanks for the share