back to article BlackBerry BBM, email offline AGAIN

BlackBerry services are offline again after a burst of precious uptime that followed 20 hours of fail yesterday. Orange UK sent out an email alert to its BlackBerry-toting customers at around 13.30 BST saying it had "been made aware of interruption in some BlackBerry data services by Research in Motion". "Some users will …

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  1. David Cotterill
    Facepalm

    Rise of the Idiots

    Of course it doesn't help when one of the biggest things being processed through the RIM servers at the moment it a repeated chain message along the lines of "you must send this message to all of your BBM contacts to re-activate your BlackBerry services". Apparently people still believe such rubbish.

    1. TeeCee Gold badge
      WTF?

      DDOS techniques.

      We've had botnets and meatnets.

      Is this the first sheepnet at work?

      1. Steve Evans

        @TeeCee

        I take it you're not on facebook then?

  2. Llama
    Megaphone

    Nothing to see here

    Blackberry don't seem to have learned anything from the epic Sony hack customer communication failure.

    When will companies learn that keeping silent and pretending nothig is wrong will only drive your customers away.

    Megaphone - "Nothing wrong, please move along, keep buying our products!"

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Hardly the same..

      Sony couldn't tell people anything until the system had been backed up and forensic analysis as to what had been compromised had been determined.

      How hard is it to grasp that? I know it's fashionable to jump on the Sony hate bandwagon like all the other idiots, but why not use some intelligence and question what the idiots tell you....

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Well since no Blackberrys are receiving BBM messages or emails it would be a bit difficult for RIM to inform all Blackberry users......I don't follow RIM on Twitter or Facebook so those methods are pointless to me and while I can receive SMS messages, RIM don't have my details to send them too.

      Would have appreciated an SMS from O2 though since thats who I pay for my Blackberry service.

      1. Reading Your E-mail
        Coat

        Erm, actually I think you'll find it's the consumer side that has the problem, business customers are fine, my blackberry is behaving normally, no probs at all in the last 2 days.

        ....and now I will run before someone finds a new holster for my blackberry :)

  3. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Remind me again

    why people buy phones with centralised servers for browsing and messaging? Ah yes, because they are fucking idiots thats why....

    1. Headley_Grange Silver badge

      Some people buy them because the BES is pretty secure compared to other mail servers. The more waggish might suggest that denying access to everyone is about as secure as you can get.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Errr no Bazza

      Less idiot, more:

      - It's cheap

      - World fails to end if it goes titsup once every few years

      Not everyone bathes in such a masturbatory frenzy of self important connectedness that a server outage equates to the fall of Rome.

  4. Northern Fop
    Pirate

    Dooooomed

    Not content with rearranging deckchairs, the folks at RIM have gone belowdecks and are actively drilling holes below the waterline.

    Where's the iceberg icon? Oh well, that one's the most nautical.

  5. John Young 1
    FAIL

    Grrrrr...

    Received an email from Orange about an hour ago... I wonder if they will reimburse for the downtime? lol, Silly question really.. :)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Unless you're on a business contract with an agreed SLA it's unlikely.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Childcatcher

      They should

      They should and TBH you shouldn't have to ask, but you will have too. RIM have a contract with the telco's - they have to to run there services and for that they need link to the Telco's infrastructure via VPN link from there RIM servers to the telco network. Now if your a business customer you have your own VPN link to your own server. Business customers are ok, unless you one of the many sole traders or one of those people in the RIM advert who runs a business that dosn't use there own server. You are on what is for all effect is known as punter contracts and running a buiness on it. Now business contracts you have some protection from this as in compensation, same with BT home and buiness broadband, home is cheaper on many level, you now know why.

      Anyhow back to compensation RIM's contacts have a uptime for there service in the form of a SLA and as all maintenance is ITIL'd out the ass as it's telco's were dealing with hear and they tend to take IT more seriously than any doctor takes somebody sneezing (Telco's are in permenant swine flu panic mode). So given this outage will most surely bust the SLA levels set on all there contracts for this month then you local telco (Orange in your case) will be paying RIM nothing this month for the service; You on the other hand will be charged as contactualy Orange can do that. Now fair's fair and if you contact Orange and complain you wil eventualy get a good-will gesture - Telco speak for ok were giving you some compensation for a mistake we made towards you but won't formaly acknowledge that as were so paranoid about admiting faults to our customers were it effects income we tend to keep as silent as possible. this is why you will have to chase Orange for compensation and Orange wont have to chase RIM for compensation.

      So in effect it's on of those situations were RIM play real fair with there customers and there customers (IE the telco's who resell the service) are not as fair and actualy make more profit out of such events than they do when it's running 100% uptime with no issues. They also get to pass the buck onto RIM for there mistake they have admited to and are gladly playing fair and cool with teclo's who in turn get to shaft the customers by actualy making profit out of such issue's. Think of Telco's as banks in 5-10 years time and you can see how there going to evolve business and mentality wise.

      So is it RIM's fault - if your a telco then yes, if your a customer of a telco who pays the telco for that service then contractualy your beef is with the telco and not RIM as you pay the telco your money and not RIM so you contract and indeed your only dealing are with the telco's. It is the telco who is the only player here that has a beef with RIM, RIM just been more open than other outsourced 3rd party services being resold.

      So please BB all your friends when you can and get your telco's to pass on the good faith/good-will gestures on to you the effected.

      That all said as RIM have been public, a little bit more official detail would be nice as saying a server died is like saying a computer died exactly and it's also like saying that there is a single point of failure with no redundancy and no DR which is something I, even of RIM refuse to believe unless they realy did get rid of all the wrong people managment wise. Which after this internaly heads should role, just that I suspect it will be the wrong heads again.

      1. Annihilator
        Stop

        @PXG

        You're paying exactly the same tariff to the network provider regardless of whether it's a Blackberry device you're using or not. You are not paying O2 Vodafone et al for any Blackberry services.

        The Blackberry services are in essence free to Blackberry owners. What you and the rest of the world are currently b1tching about is the loss of a free (proprietary) service accessible only by a proprietary app on a proprietary device. You'd be as well asking for a refund from Google when gmail is offline - I'm sure they'd be happy to give you 100% of the price you've paid them: £0.00

        This is really the equivalent of Whatsapp failing. I also find it odd that people are quick to attack Apple's walled garden approach, but seem to leave RIM/BB alone.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Free?

          I can't speak for other networks, but on Three you pay a fiver extra per month for 'Blackberry services' on a SIM only deal. I use it myself to run my SIM-free BB Pearl on.

          However I have my own BES-Express server, and haven't noticed ANY problems or outages over the past few days. To be fair though I don't use BBM :-P

  6. John Young 1

    @David, that msg doing the rounds happens virtually every month.. I keep telling my contacts that its all bs, but do they stop forwarding it?? Do the hell,.. :(

  7. Tom Wood

    Eggs...baskets...

    The Internet works well because it's distributed. Sure, if your company email server goes down nobody can communicate with your company for a while, but the rest of the world is OK.

    Outages like this demonstrate quite nicely why relying on closed proprietary networks is a bad idea.

  8. pctechxp
    Thumb Down

    Complete lack of redundancy

    This shows a complete lack of redundancy in their network, time for a backup DC?

  9. HP Cynic

    I'm going to be tasteless and blame RIM's issues on the Ghost of Steve Jobs.

    iPoltergeist.

  10. Andy Farley
    Coat

    All those Blackberries crashed?

    They must be in a jam.

    (I'm so sorry)

  11. s. pam Silver badge
    Holmes

    What a fucking pickle

    How can they do this again, is BigBother in Camoron's gubmnt installing all the monitoring and tracking applications today?

    It is not just Orange, O2 is down as well!

    I've got a mountain of expense report receipts I need to send to work so I can get money back.

    Scum Tower Gazillionaires the lot of em.

    1. Annihilator
      FAIL

      The award for epic fail goes to s. pam for:

      a) relying on a proprietary service for work.

      b) not discerning between the network provider (Orange & O2 are down you say? They seem to be working just fine) and RIM's services.

  12. LarsG

    IT MAKES ME SMILE

    Hearing how all these Blackberry users are screaming they will change to iphones, from one closed environment to another. Oh dear, don't panic darlings, Android is here to help.

  13. Daniel B.
    Boffin

    Meanwhile, in Latin America

    Blackberries seem to be working just fine.

    Except for some downtime around 00:00 GMT -0500, when I noticed that my BBM messages ceased to get sent, and my 3G indicator stopped showing the BB logo. However, even TCP-Direct stopped working, so I suspect it was a carrier-related hiccup, not a BB one. Didn't have a nearby WiFi to verify this...

    1. Degenerate Scumbag

      Some of us in the UK are fine too.

      I manage a team in London with six Blackberries on T-Mobile and our service has been problem free throughout, despite recieving apologetic SMSs from our carrier.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    These Research In Motion terrorists must be stopped!

    Or maybe whoever does Orange's releases needs to brush up on their writing skills...

  15. Grommet
    Coat

    Not the end of the wordl...

    I rely on my blackberry for its true push email. It's not the end of the world though I just have to fire up the laptop once an hour and check it manually. My customers aren't getting as fast a response as usual and it is a bbit of a bballache but not the end of the world.

    Mines the one without a phone in the pocket, no point carrying it about.....

  16. Paul Stevenson
    Pint

    and on Vodafone...

    My Blackberry Internet Services is still offline; it struggles and manages to get a couple of emails through and then gives up and goes for a pint... speaking of which, that doesn't sound like such a bad idea... Yes dear, I'm testing coverage in the local area, the pub.

    Beer? well, just because

  17. tin 2
    FAIL

    No resilience, no service status updates. Denial of at least the extent of the problem. On probably one of the biggest "cloud" services out there. And people still falling over themselves to not have their stuff on their own tin in their own rooms?

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How do I complain?

    So what happens if Twitter now crashes?

    BTW Blackberry users - it's also doubles as a phone.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    BlackBerry BES and T-Mobile still down at 8pm, as they have been on my service since 11.30 am today. Two days in succession and I am beginning to regret stopping using my Nokia E72 and Symbian a few weeks ago on the grounds of service reliability.

  20. Paul Taylor 1
    Thumb Down

    Still down, 8.30pm GMT

    All our company Blackberry's are still down @ 8.30pm GMT.

    No BBM, no Internet, and even our own in-house BES server has stopped pushing emails to phones.

    So the statement that BES servers are OK is BS.........

    This is an Epic Fail for RIM.

    1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      Happy

      RE: Still down, 8.30pm GMT

      No probs on our UK-based BES, or the one in the Mid East. Can I suggest you point your ire at your BES admins?

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'm sorry, I don't get this

    BBM is important. It is more important to its users than voice mail, SMS or MMS. Have RIM seriously never heard of effective server clustering and (very) remote disaster recovery sites?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @AC

      If it's so important to you then have *YOU* never heard of these things too?

      Shit happens as they say.

      If this is the worst outage BB have had in the whole time they have been doing business - then I think they are doing a pretty damn good job tbqh.

  22. vilemeister
    FAIL

    2 days of major downtime in 12 years. Thats not bad going.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Unless this is a sign of things to come due to significant staff cuts...

  23. Wize

    "...I'm seriously considering moving over to the iPhone side..."

    Sounds like the equivalent of standing on the rooftop and threatening to jump.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    To the cloud

    OH NO a sign of things to come, another brilliant idea, for the toilet

    It does show you one point of failure means FAILURE!

    The cloud is going to be great, one point of failure, one ISP goes down and HP and DELL are selling servers like mad to customer escaping the cloud Yay! MAD!

    Oh well lucky we don't have a one point of failure with virtual computing, unless your VM OS goes down, oh well guess real servers in the real world work if one goes down you have another backup, if the internet goes down, you don't have to send everyone home.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Compensation - lol

    The cries from punters for compensation make me chuckle:

    OK, lets divide the cost of your BB services by 30 to give a figure for a days outage - there ya go, have 17 pence!

    No updates from RIM yet this morning, BIS email is sporadic and BBM still appears to be karked

  26. Pie

    May not be server admins Matt Bryant

    1 out of our 4 BB users has been affected by this, all run off the same BIS, with the same handsets set up at the same time...

  27. Lloyd
    Facepalm

    Back on again?

    Well, it must have come back on at about 4am because the release email we sent last night at 9pm seems to have annoyed a lot of the upper management by waking them up.

  28. Andy Watt
    FAIL

    Retreat In Pieces, Research In Motion.

    That is all.

  29. Jason Hall

    and?

    I'm certainly no BB apologist - but wtf?

    Will you moaning tosspots please just grow-up.

    So what if you can't get your email for a couple of hours. Boo-fecking-hoo!

    If it's that important you shouldn't be relying on just one supplier/method of receiving it.

  30. fourThirty
    Facepalm

    Bothered....

    I have a Bold on my personal Orange contract, and I haven't been affected one bit by the outages. I have numerous alternative methods to get my email, and I'm able to send text messages and make phone calls. If you rely on 3rd party services to enable you to feel human and not isolated from the real world, then a reality check may be in order!

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