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Quoted By: >>686115
Update 2:15 p.m. PST: No sooner do I post this than RIM goes and issues an explanation for the outage. Read on for the details...
In the immortal words of Cinderella's Tom Kiefer, you don't know what you got, till it's gone.
Monday's widespread BlackBerry outage--the second major one in the past 12 months--left Research In Motion customers stranded and cut off from the rest of the world, sort of like what happened to the '80s glam metal band after Long Cold Winter. The Internet's equivalent of a snow day left reams of e-mail messages undelivered for about three hours Monday, according to RIM, which either still hasn't figured out exactly what caused the problem, or isn't willing to disclose the cause just yet.
Representatives for AT&T and Verizon told several media outlets Monday that from what they understood, all wireless carriers in North America that work with RIM were affected. The last time an outage of this magnitude occurred, in April, RIM blamed a database problem that snowballed when the backup "failover" process didn't work as planned.
It's amazing how dependent people have become on their mobile devices. CrackBerry addiction is an old story, but it keeps surfacing every time people are forced to go more than 10 minutes without access to their e-mail. Local television stations in San Francisco all teased the BlackBerry outage on their 11 p.m. newscasts as a near-disaster, since we don't have weather events out here to keep people watching the local news.
While coverage of the outage just goes to show how mobile devices like the BlackBerry really are becoming the next wave of personal computing, it also points out that the entire system has a single point of failure: RIM itself.
http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9870509-37.html?tag=nefd.lede
In the immortal words of Cinderella's Tom Kiefer, you don't know what you got, till it's gone.
Monday's widespread BlackBerry outage--the second major one in the past 12 months--left Research In Motion customers stranded and cut off from the rest of the world, sort of like what happened to the '80s glam metal band after Long Cold Winter. The Internet's equivalent of a snow day left reams of e-mail messages undelivered for about three hours Monday, according to RIM, which either still hasn't figured out exactly what caused the problem, or isn't willing to disclose the cause just yet.
Representatives for AT&T and Verizon told several media outlets Monday that from what they understood, all wireless carriers in North America that work with RIM were affected. The last time an outage of this magnitude occurred, in April, RIM blamed a database problem that snowballed when the backup "failover" process didn't work as planned.
It's amazing how dependent people have become on their mobile devices. CrackBerry addiction is an old story, but it keeps surfacing every time people are forced to go more than 10 minutes without access to their e-mail. Local television stations in San Francisco all teased the BlackBerry outage on their 11 p.m. newscasts as a near-disaster, since we don't have weather events out here to keep people watching the local news.
While coverage of the outage just goes to show how mobile devices like the BlackBerry really are becoming the next wave of personal computing, it also points out that the entire system has a single point of failure: RIM itself.
http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9870509-37.html?tag=nefd.lede
