RIM stands, staggers, falls again BlackBerry Messenger is down again, despite RIM's assurances that everything would be fine. It seems lots of people can't get connected and partners are receiving notifications about ongoing problems. Despite the fact that the Canadian company has replaced the failing core switch, the service fell down yet again, leaving many …
"According to folklore legend, on the 10th October the Devil pees on the blackberries and they become unfit"
- taken from Allotment Vegetable growing
The BBC nature pages have a variant on it
"On Old Michaelmas Day (10th Oct) the Devil puts his foot on blackberries"
& monday when I believe all this started was the 10th October.
Coincidence ?
In Blackberry tradition and because how the OS/Network works, removing battery and re-plugging is a common "solution". You can bet a lot of BB users did today since to do anything related to BIS (e.g. activate subscription), operator instructs you to do so.
Sad thing is, I sense another MS Winphone partner (!) soon.
Surely they mean turned off then on again? Just shows what celebs know eh?
On another note, according to his update at 17:44 yesterday - http://www.rim.com/newsroom/service-update.shtml - the CIO wants to "connect with you directly"....
.... We are RIM. Existence, as you know it, is over. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile.
Funny how the people whose businesses are "serious effected" by this, somehow manage to find the time and technology to post on this site and the BBC sites of their outrage and inconvenience
So it's down for 3 or 4 days.... so what - welcome to the world of modern technology where NOTHING is perfect. If it's superhypercritical then get some sort of back up, and then get over it.
When the first blackberries first came out everyone carried their blackberry for work, but then also carried around another phone for voice as the performance of the blackberries were completely terrible. That seemed to fade after a while, but now I'm noticing that people are carrying a Blackberry as well as an iPhone or Android phone. This time for access to the data and apps I bet.
I'll bet that all it would take is some enterprise-grade iPhone controls and people would drop their Blackberry in a second. These guys have nowhere to go but farther down.
They've made an announcement that a core switch died, and the back-up also died.
I just don't believe that. Both switches failed independtly of each other within 2 days of each other? I smell BS!
if it is true, given the level of criticality these applications have for their users, and many of those users are business users! a redundancy of one device is no way sufficient. Idiots.
If your primary fails you then switch over to your back up, that places you at high risk because you've got no futher backups, and it means your top priority has to get the primary device fixed as quickly as possible, incase your back-up also fails. So running off a single back-up, when that back-up is activated because your primary has failed, you're already running at a reduced level of service with an increased level of risk compared to the normally fully functioning state.
I would be surprised if this is a hardware failure in both devices, my betting is they've hit a software bug within the switch and both primary and back-up switches are identical: identical hardware, identical software, one bug hits one and then is liable to hit the other as they're identical. Idiots.
I disagree with your use of the word NOC. NOCs don't route traffic. The NOC technically is the processes, people and technology which enables the service provider to assure their services. And this will typically consist of fault management systems: the applications and infrastructure to support that, trouble ticketing systems, performance management systems and so on.
Now some companies co-locate their NOC with operational network equipment in the same building, indeed the servers used to support the NOC can even be located in the same racks as the comms equipment but fundamentally the NOC does not route 'service' traffic.
I work for a managed services provider, and to us and most others in IT, the NOC monitors the health of the network, but RIM are Canadians.
I was surprised by initial reports that BES was unaffected, because every BES server must communicate with a NOC to exchange mail with the handsets. It is possible that RIM provides more back end services to BIS than BES, and that is why BIS is affected more. My recollection is that there were 2 or 3 NOCs that handle the entire world. It seems like a crazy architecture to me, being so centralized, but I assumed they had some really good backup/failover capability. I would have thought that RIM would have the ability to fail over to a backup NOC, but their architecture may make this difficult. Keep in mind that every handset is sending all data communication (web, email, BBM, IM, etc) through a NOC, The only exceptions are SMS (done by the voice network) and Internet access if you are using WiFi instead of the cellular network.
I did work for a credit card authorization provider and they ran everything on Tandem or Stratus systems (built with lots of internal redundancy), and if they lost an entire machine they could bring up another one very quickly. They had redundant X.25 links from multiple providers, and an X.25 switch (my part, sigh) with a lot of built in redundancy. Those guys were serious about eliminating single points of failure. If they are still around, perhaps they can get some consulting work with RIM.
Also, don't assume that when RIM says a "core switch" failed, they mean a Cisco 6509 or similar. They don't really tell partners anything about the internals of the NOC, but it wouldn't surprise me if a "core switch" is what we would call a server, or perhaps even a mainframe. Remember they are doing message switching, which is usually a store and forward setup like SMTP.mail servers.
If you're fed up with RIM/Blackberry, and in an enterprise environment, then you could consider McAfee EMM - Works with iOS, droid, symbian, windows, heck, even BB. I've tried Good on an iPhone, and the McAfee product integrates much more nicely into the iPhone's natural way of doing things.
Anonymous, because, well, I work for McAfee, and don't want to out myself.
No one has yet thought of hackers.
Remember how pissed the script kiddies were that RIM was to hand over logs to the UK police investigating the recent rioting and how they promised to target them soon?
I cant see a core switch being a) so hard to figure out, and b) taking so long to fix. There's more to this than meets the eye....
But how long until RIM fess up? What was the target time-to-fess-up set by Sony over PSN again?
Just heard a large bank (not naming) had a total nightmare in communications today.
As they must be running their own BES, can assume enterprise must be effected. Guys were really, really pissed.
Anyway, I couldn't check for updates on a consumer BB just yesterday, from a computer. Their app was really acting very strange.
This downtime, with their greedy network partners all over the continent making sure they will get the money from the 48+ hours of downtime will sure mark the day of BB's ultimate decline.
Having been mostly unaffected by the Blackberry disservice ... today, we've been hit. HARD.
Most of the day my BB icon has been showing ... but I haven't been able to actually SEND or RECEIVE messages. ARRRGH!!!
RIM, Fix This Thing! I can't get others to buy into BB if the damn thing loses connectivity while convincing new people! :P
As BB seems to be primarily used by teenagers to tell each other how pissed they got last night on White Lightning cider ( alright, de-icer with apple flavouring! ) I can't see that the BB network going down is any great loss!
Yes it's used by businesses but only so managers can massage their egos and appear "on the ball" by checking their bloody emails every two seconds! With the BB being down it's given we underlings some peace and quiet to get on with our work, as the managers cannot keep nagging us while they're out and about on third-party vendor jollies!
Just stay down until Friday afternoon, please!!!
I object to the fact that everything (except voice) that a RIM phone sends or receives has to pass through RIM infrastructure. This makes the phone extremely dependent on the company that sells it, and if by chance they go bankrupt and cease operations, all RIM users will be left with a bunch of expensive toys, and be lucky if they can still make a regular phone call. I don't like being dependent on both RIM and the cellular network's infrastructure, too many things can go wrong without knowing who's fault it is.
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4414&Itemid=35
Blackberries are owned by people who think they're incredibly important, whereas iPhones are owned by people who think iPhones are incredibly important and Android phones are owned by poor people who don't matter."
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