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BlackBerry outage blankets North America

Consumer BlackBerry users across North America endured extended delays in email service earlier today due to some sort of technical glitch in the messaging network run by BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. According to Bloomberg, the outage hit all consumer BlackBerry users in the US, regardless of carrier, and consumer …

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jake

That explains it ...

I was wondering why all the folks habituating the normal "Real Estate" watering holes were a trifle more twitchy than normal today here in Sonoma ... Someone needs to explain to these folks that sometimes a phone is just a phone, and that email is not only "store and forward", but also not guaranteed delivery ... and the two are NOT the same technology, nor tied to each other in any way, shape, or form ...

"Crackberry" is one of the best technological put-downs I've ever run across :-)

Alan W. Rateliff, II
Paris Hilton

Last outage in two years??

Some radio news outlet was reporting that it has been two years since BlackBerry suffered an outage.

Seriosly, wat?? ISTR several times in the past year alone having to explain to customers why they were not receiving emails forwarded to BlackBerry accounts. Several outages of several hours, but we will just focus on the BIG outages; it just makes the system look better that way.

Paris, a little aggravating as well.

Pandy06269
WTF?

Why does this affect all carriers?

I've never used a BlackBerry in my life, but I'm wondering why is it the manufacturer's responsibility for the e-mail access? I thought that would be down to the carrier.

Like my e-mail is with my e-mail provider, my website with my hosting provider and my Internet access through my ISP - I wouldn't expect any of those services to be supplied by Apple because they're on my Mac. But I could fully understand if my ISP provided them.

Rasczak
Boffin
Reply Icon

All Carriers

BlackBerry email is not direct access to your mailbox on the device. Either, for Enterprise, you run a BlackBerry Server against an Exchange, Domino or Groupwise mail system, or, for consumer, you set up a BlackBerry mail account and it accesses your mailboxes and copies mail onto to your device.

Either way the device connects to a RIM controlled server to pass the mail from the mailbox to the device, the same RIM server is used for all carriers in a region.

It would be the North America RIM server that was affected here, so any carrier whose customers, including roamed, would use that server would be affected.

Justin Pasher
Reply Icon

No big surprise

@Pandy06269: Blackberry makes the devices and they also run the mail servers that handle the "push" traffic (i.e. when you send an email to the address assigned to your Blackberry, such as joebob@tmo.blackberry.net).

On that same note, RIM has always been a little clueless when it comes to properly running a mail server. For example, they had a problem about a year ago (and I'm sure they still do) where they would silently drop all forwarded emails where the original sender was @yahoo.com. If you decide to redirect a copy (M$ Exchange rule) of your incoming email to your @*.blackberry.net address to get them "real time", and the original sender was @yahoo.com, the RIM servers would accept the email, then silently drop it on the floor. After multiple hours on the phone with their clueless "tech support" people, along with countless mail logs proving they accepted the emails, the problem was never fixed (luckily the person experiencing the problem has moved to an iPhone that syncs directly with Exchange).

I personally think it's all a scam to try to force the users to buy their stupid Enterprise Server software.

Daniel B.
Happy

Not all of North America

Here in Mexico, my BB never stopped getting emails. Or at least, not in normal hours ... I doubt I'd ever be in a hurry to get e-mail at 2 am. Anyway, the only "delayed" email I see was one sent at 3am which arrived at 4am. All those chain-letters and social networking site "updates" still arrived on time.

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