BlackBerry Internet Service outage in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa)
BIS outages are the biggest pain for any BlackBerry user. It seems that we are currently in the middle of a huge outage affecting Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It seems that this was due to the United Kingdom's BlackBerry servers going down and that correlates to the outages in the rest of EMEA region. No timetable has been set for when this issue will be fixed completely.
RIM is very aware of the problem and is working to get it fixed as soon as possible, but as you all can imagine, maintaining and fixing a global network problem that expands over 3 continents is not as easy task. We'll keep you updated with any news we receive!
- Are you affected by this outage? Let us know here!
BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) Outage Day 2
What is becoming one of the largest BIS outages in BlackBerry's history, might not be close to getting fixed. This massive outage, that's now affecting 4 continents, was thought to have been resolved last night. Unfortunately for BlackBerry users in Europe, South America, Africa and parts of Asia, the U.K. server crash that occurred yesterday is still causing issues for them today.
Research In Motion has sent the following message out to carriers world wide changing the time of resolution from 4 hours to "no resolution time"
"Please see the latest update on the issue. There is still no resolution time available.
- The BlackBerry Support Team has identified a network connectivity issue between data centers and Support Teams are working on resolution of this now.
- BES email is recovering well.
- BIS email may be experiencing some delays in sending/receiving messages.
- BBM is impacted and many users are experiencing delays.
- BlackBerry Browsing may be impaired.
- The support teams are continuing to manage message queues and are performing controlled restarts of any affected components."
Research In Motion's official Twitter support account @BlackBerryHelp has been bombarded the last 48 hours with understandably angry tweets from BlackBerry users worldwide. RIM's response, since yesterday morning through the moment this article is being written, are 5 tweets.
Anyone that knows me knows I defend RIM possibly a little too much. Unfortunately though, this is embarrassing and indefensible. Errors happen and outages as big as this one can occur; the lack of communication via official statements, or even tweets, is what gets to certain people. Unfortunately though, if RIM came out and said "this will be fixed in two hours" and two hours pass by and it's not fixed, then guess who would get killed for having said it would be fixed? Research In Motion. It's a complete and total catch 22 for them.
This could not have come at worst time for RIM. With Apple's iPhone 4S release not being as crazy as people expected, BlackBerry could've made (and still technically can make) a huge splash in the public's perception with a great showing at DevCon next week. Unfortunately, right now RIM is making headlines for all the wrong reasons.
- Where are you and how is this affecting you? Let us know in the forums!
The RIMpocalypse Outage of 2011 now affecting Canadian users
RIMpocalypse continues into late Tuesday night on the east coast of North America. With the EMEA region still experiencing a BIS outage, it seems now North American users are seeing delays and complete failure of delivery of BBMs. Email and browsing seems to not be impaired but as you can imagine, BBM seems to be what some (read "most") BlackBerry users care about.
Earlier this afternoon, BlackBerry issued the following statement via their official Facebook page about the cause of the outage:
"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."
Some reports have suggested the EMEA outage could be fixed by 8am BST/3am EST which hopefully could be the end of the outage worldwide.
- Let us know if you've been affected by this recent outage in Canada.
