DailyTech - Major Blackberry Outage Leaves North Americans Twiddling Their Thumbs

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Gadgets Major Blackberry Outage Leaves North Americans Twiddling Their Thumbs
Chris Peredun - April 18, 2007 4:56 PM

2 comment(s) - last by Mitch101.. on Apr 19 at 10:48 AM

Failure at RIM's network operations center causes flood of reports

The familiar Blackberry has a special place in the hearts of many businesses, and its addictive qualities have caused many users to affectionately dub it the "Crackberry." But with each addiction comes the risk of withdrawl symptoms, as evidenced by the swarm of reports of last night's widespread outage that affected all of North America.

There were no small number of sites reporting on the failure of a SRP (Server Routing Protocol) server in RIM's Network Operations Centers, which severely crippled the functionality of devices in the Western hemisphere. While RIM does have two major NOCs supporting North America, the scope of the problem was evidently enough to overwhelm the available redundancy.

In response to this short outage, RIM's share price fell nearly a full percentage point on the Toronto Stock Exchange, and customers were less than pleased with the seemingly apathetic response from the company. Even RIM's own website made no mention of the outage, leading frustrated customers to reducing various third-party support forums, including the popular BlackberryForums.com community, to smouldering heaps of database errors and dropped connections.

Services were officially restored early Wednesday morning, but the massive backlog of messages from RIM's eight million Blackberry users may take some time to clear the system.