Well as we are about to enter our 3rd day of RIM’s EMEA & Latin American BIS outage we finally have a brief statement that explains what’s been happening.
I myself am in the UK and have been suffering withdrawal from not having my BIS services since 9am (GMT) on Monday and throughout this the silence from RIM has been too long..
The following statement was posted on their facebook page;
“The messaging and browsing delays being experienced by BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina were caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure. Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested. As a result, a large backlog of data was generated, and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience, and we will continue to keep you informed”
Again this response from RIM raises doubts about the companies server infrastructure and in my earlier post it was quoted that RIM had been suffering with underlying issues for a while but had chosen to ignore them.
A former employee had told the Guardian that RIM had been ignoring problems with its server architecture that could prove its downfall for years.
“They didn’t start looking at scalability until about 2007, when they had around 8m active devices,” the former employee said: “The attitude was, ‘We’re going to grow and grow but making sure our infrastructure can support it isn’t a priority.’ They have their own clunky infrastructure to do something that you don’t really need a clunky infrastructure to do anymore.”
I personally would like to see RIM make some sort of gesture of goodwill to users effected by this outage, be it through a direct voucher or via their carriers.
Lets hope this matter is resolved soon and RIM make the right changes to make sure a repeat of this will never happen again.
Are you effected by the ongoing BIS outage? Let us know your thoughts below or via our twitter @BBEmpire & @BBerryEmipre
Quote Sources: The Guardian & RIM