A BlackBerry Bold, left, and a Blackberry Tour, made by Research In Motion Inc.Paul Sakuma
The same technology that earned Research In Motion Ltd. millions of high-value business and government customers has given the Canadian smart phone maker a black eye this week, after BlackBerry users experienced two service outages in five days.
Many of RIM's enterprise customers across North America - the business and public sector clients who for years formed the company's core user base - lost access to Internet and e-mail services on their devices for much of Tuesday evening. Less than a week earlier, another disruption affected RIM's consumer clients. The service interruptions are a rarity for the company: Before this week, RIM's most recent major disruption was in early 2008.
It didn't take long for BlackBerry users to vent their frustration. The bulk of this week's disruption took place between 6:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday and about 2 a.m. yesterday morning, leading thousands of angry users to complain online, posting messages such as: "I survived the BlackBerry Apocalypse."
"When you put up the big brass plate advertising how reliable you are, even a few minutes of downtime tends to cause enormous public outrage," Deloitte Canada analyst Duncan Stewart.
"At some level that's actually a good thing, because it shows how attached people are to their BlackBerrys. But when you brand yourself as reliable, you have to keep being reliable."
Unlike most other smart phone makers, RIM routes every message to or from a BlackBerry through its central network system. That centralization is at the heart of the BlackBerry's most appealing features, such as the near-instantaneous delivery of PIN messages and some powerful security measures. Indeed, many major corporations that deal with sensitive data rely on such centralized systems.
RIM's centralized system is one that carriers are particularly fond of, Mr. Stewart said, because the flow of messages between BlackBerrys tends to put much less pressure on the carriers' networks. "A million BlackBerry customers use much less traffic than a million other smart phone customers."
But the downside of the system is that when there's a failure, massive swaths of BlackBerry customers suffer. A highly distributed system might fail more often, but each failure won't cripple a large portion of the network.
In a terse statement that included an apology to customers, Waterloo, Ont.-based RIM blamed the outage on problems with BlackBerry Messenger, an application it updated twice in rapid succession in the past week. RIM also strongly encouraged users to upgrade to a third version that the company says resolves the problem.
"RIM apologizes to its customers for any inconvenience and has taken corrective action to restore service," it said.
Asked by e-mail how many users were affected, and whether the company plans to compensate customers, a RIM spokeswoman did not reply.
RIM suffered a similar disruption last week, on the same day it posted its latest quarterly results. That disruption, however, affected individual consumers, rather than large-scale customers.
During Tuesday's interruption, BlackBerry users still had access to voice and text-messaging functions. However, on Tuesday night the backlog of pending messages waiting to be delivered to enterprise clients spiked to unusually high levels, according to Mitch Berk, director of product management for BoxTone, a U.S. mobility management firm that deals with enterprise clients running BlackBerry systems.
At around midnight, RIM reset the connection between the enterprise servers and its network operating centre, at which point the pending messages list began to clear, Mr. Berk said. By 2:45 a.m., BoxTone's customers had received all their remaining messages.
Considering that RIM's total disruption time in the past 18 months has amounted to only a few hours, this week's breakdown will likely prove to be a bigger public relations headache than a fundamental problem with its technology.
"They run an incredibly stable and high-performance network," Mr. Berk said. "But no network's perfect."