BlackBerry outage and announcements

25 April 2007 by Rod McLaren

When you provide a service that is normally so reliable that it’s invisible, it’s shocking when it falls over. Last week RIM’s email service fell over for 12 or so hours on Tuesday. The resulting furore in the tech press highlighted how essential their service is (frustrated users), and that they can do a much better job communicating when failures happen (angry users and commentators).

The outage affected email and presumably data services for many North American users. Voice and sms services shouldn’t have been affected because they go directly via the mobile operator) and also any internet browsing that had been set up to avoid going via the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. And, as far I can can tell, no services in UK/Europe were affected at all. A software update went wrong, and the speculation is that big subscriber growth in the last year may have put some strain on RIM’s North American/Asian network operations centre.

They do clearly need to communicate better. I’d like to see RIM offer something like Salesforce’s trust.salesforce.com, a public-facing system status website that’s informative (and which confidently repositions uptime as a selling point). But if their corporate culture has always been to defer customer communication to the mobile operators that are the sales channel, then provide brandable versions of a status.blackberry.com for those operators.

Of course, in the days since, RIM have upped the outbound media flow and pre-announced their support for selected Windows Mobile devices. It seems that the BlackBerry interface and applications will run from an icon in the Windows Mobile interface – it will be interesting to see how BlackBerry’s end-to-end simplicity/security story fares inside WinMob.

Mobile confessions: simplicity and nostalgia Mobile User Experience conference, 2-3 May 2007