back to article BlackBerry takes Monday afternoon off

BlackBerry users got some time yesterday to smell the flowers and talk to their families and friends - the company's email servers went down just after 3pm Eastern Standard Time. Full service was not restored until about 11pm, although there was intermittent uptime. Users could not check emails or browse the web. It is likely …

COMMENTS

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  1. Clemens Wachter
    Thumb Down

    Downtime

    So they had 12hrs downtime in April 2007 and 8hrs yesterday. 20hrs in 11 months.

    Uptime: 1-(20/(11*30*24)) = 0,9975 = 99,75%

    Definitely not 'five nines'. For a normal IT system, this uptime would be fine, but for a multi-million $ NOC....

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Pardon?

    "especially as there are now several ways to get emails onto a handheld device"

    You mean as in phones doing POP/IMAP, like, every device that is not made by RIM? Now imagine all the crackberry addicts locked into that proprietary service... then push outage... outrage... riots... 28 days later dispersed survivors in abandoned tower blocks feverishly try to telnet into their mailboxes with impro-acoustic couplers...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    re downtime

    Um, consider the uptime is actually longer then 11 months. It's a few years really, which I'm pretty sure equates easily to the five nines.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    QA'd by who - anon!!!

    Whatever managment layers they changed a year ago clearly needs a rethink. But at least they wern't hacked - as they made a statement saying as much rather fast, too fast some might say =).

    Anon'd to preserve income and cover the truth. But sod what the press say its all down to the share price which some people actualy made money out of yesterday. Have to love investment banks turning high volumes on the back of bad news they indirectly control.

  5. Clemens Wachter
    Thumb Down

    Re: re downtime

    Get some math coaching, please. Rule of three, anyone?

    'five nines': 99,999% uptime equals 0,001% downtime.

    0,001% is equivalent to 20hrs

    99,999% is equivalent to 1,999,980hrs

    1,999,980 hours is ~228 years. I doubt that RIM has been around in 1780...

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    re re downtime

    "re downtime

    By Anonymous Coward

    Posted Tuesday 12th February 2008 12:15 GMT

    Um, consider the uptime is actually longer then 11 months. It's a few years really, which I'm pretty sure equates easily to the five nines."

    Please show me were a telco will accept me selecting the period over several years until I get the figure I and they like as I'm sure alot of companies that supply SLA leveled services would love to have that kind of cherry pick option when doing monthly stats. Seriously you could make money selling that kind of information. I know ITEL has flaws but statistical accounting is not one of them. Now had you said proactive no reactive QA/troubleshooting then I would totaly agree as ITEL is event driven and as such you need an event to act upon like yesterdays outage. Then the head beans will be after limiting the end-user effect just to keep the stats ok until they go past the magic SLA level and then its more a case of were taking a hit so when you get it up make sure it stays up type of honest troubleshooting.

    Bottom line its what they dont say about such outages and the number of smaller outages they have endured over the past year that implies a bigger underlying problem beyond simple statistics and headlines. Now that is a story now telco would want to read, hence it will stay in the closets.

    Spin on Jim.

  7. Dr Who

    Downtime calculation

    Any serious outfit will calculate its downtime on a monthly basis. February this year has 29 days which equals 696 hours. 8 hours is therefore only 98.85% uptime.

    Calculating downtime on a cumulative basis would be meaningless. Even with five nines that means you could have a single outage of nearly 44 hours in a five year period and still claim to be within the service level. That would be pretty pointless really.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Its ok

    My old windows Mobile went down daily, daily I had to pull the battery. If I count the 30 minutes for rebooting a day and the 8hours batterly life, well you can see where I am going with this ...

  9. Malachy

    @Clemens Wachter

    Rule of three?? Anyway, you have an arbitary figure of 0.001% = 20 hrs. Ignoring the fact you used 0,001 and therfore 1 and also 99,999% where did you get a period of 20hrs?

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    @Anon RE: Its ok

    Well 30 mins to reboot a phone is your problem and not the phone, at very best its the network. But again your input has as much creedance than saying yeah well DOS 5 was shite so they didn't do that bad.

    Pre-pearl blackberrys were very robust handsets, but the pearl's pysicaly cant take the knocks like the old ones and the ghey trackball is nowere as useful for scrolling thru emails. Actualy the wifi stack is still buggy as a punched card covered in honey and left out for several weeks. So M$ aint all that bad.

    PS get your blackberry and intergrate a email server running on your home connection and see what this so-called push-email actualy is as its akin to a DDOS the rate they poll. If Microsoft did that then users would be crying OMG it takes 30 mins to boot up this phone in droves, until then. You pays your money and you takes your chances. That and email lacks emotions and causes more arguments and stress and as such time vampires your life away more than any simple phone-conversation can ever do.

  11. Harry the Bastard
    Stop

    re: @Clemens Wachter

    "Rule of three?? Anyway, you have an arbitary figure of 0.001% = 20 hrs. Ignoring the fact you used 0,001 and therfore 1 and also 99,999% where did you get a period of 20hrs?"

    20hrs... "So they had 12hrs downtime in April 2007 and 8hrs yesterday. 20hrs in 11 months.", or was that too difficult to read?

    in some countries , is used as the decimal point, or was that too difficult to guess?

    you have difficulty with english, deductive reasoning and simple arithmetic, i know... you work for virgin media broadband technical support, aicmfp!

  12. Martin Eriksson
    Thumb Down

    Why outsource your mobile email?

    Who in their right mind outsources something as crucial as their mobile email servers? I still can't understand why every smackberry in the world has to run off RIM's NOC?

    Surely the Exchange route of simply connecting with your own email server (under your company's control and responsibility) is the best model?

    I hate my crackberry, especially when shit like this happens.

    /bfg

  13. pctechxp

    Down with mobile e-mail

    Why do companies insist on equipping their employees with a mobile e-mail device.

    Surely time away from a desk should be treated as a rest for the eyes, why squint at a small screen?

    I'd do a job where I had to carry a company mobile but one sniff of having to use a Winmobile or Crackberry to read and respond to e-mail and it'd be bye bye.

    Am trying to let the mail mound up on my exchange account at work so eventually it'll bouncing mail and I can then say, why dont you come speak to me instead?'

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