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BlackBerry Data Service Outage Affects Multiple Carriers

Monday February 11, 2008 4:58 pm PST by longofest
Apple's largest competitor in the smartphone market, RIM, today experienced a data outage that spanned multiple carriers.

RIM said BlackBerry subscribers "may be unable to send or receive messages and may also be unable to "register their device, roam in another location, or use other services such as Internet browsing."


The outage began at roughly 3:30pm and affected all North American carriers, but not necessarily all Blackberry users. Voice and SMS was reportedly unaffected. At this time, RIM reports that service has been restored and an investigation into the outage is ongoing.

Today marks the second major BlackBerry-specific service outage since the iPhone launched in June 2007. While iPhones have occasionally been susceptible to EDGE service interruptions, there have yet to be any iPhone-specific outages.
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puckhead193
Posted: 52 months ago
my verizon pearl was fine around that time. It was slower then normal to receive emails but they still got through.....
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zflauaus
Posted: 52 months ago
During these outages, the only thing that is affected (at least in my case, on the Verizon Pearl) is BWS (Web service and email). Regular TCP connections like those using Opera Mini and other programs you can set to use TCP will work fine.
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helmsc
Posted: 52 months ago
could something like this happen to the iPhones?
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projectle
Posted: 52 months ago
There are plenty of things that could happen to the iPhone that would be just like this failure...

Let's say Visual Voicemail being offline... GASP!

Either that, or maybe push e-mail being down from Yahoo or Google Maps not being able to connect to the server.

On second thought, all of those things have happened several times.
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erandall38
Posted: 52 months ago



Apple's largest competitor in the smartphone market, RIM


Is RIM actually considered a true competitor of the iPhone?
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Mebsat
Posted: 52 months ago
Why is there a single point of failure for all Blackberries across multiple carriers? Does this knock out all enterprise BES users too or can you still check accounts manually but no push?
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aviationwiz
Posted: 52 months ago
That single point of failure is RIM's Network Operations Center, which is what provides the true push email system that RIM has.

However, this outage did not effect all users. I can speak for myself with VZW in Minneapolis, and a friend of mine on TMO in Lawrence, KS, that neither of us had any issues today.

Like projectle said, similar things have happened with the iPhone, however, since RIM is the market king for such devices and used by such a broad user base, when there is a RIM issue, that mainstream news picks up on it.

@erandall38, I whole-heartedly agree, I don't think the BlackBerry is a true competitor to the iPhone at all, nor is the iPhone a true competitor to the BlackBerry. The BlackBerry is a whole different ball game from the iPhone, some don't like it as much, or others, such as myself, like it more.
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winterspan
Posted: 52 months ago
Can anyone clarify why the Blackberry push email service/operations center would be tied in with Web browsing? Does web browsing on a blackberry go through a blackberry server web proxy? What would be the use of that?
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michaelsviews
Posted: 52 months ago

Is RIM actually considered a true competitor of the iPhone?


1. RIM is first
2. iPhone
3. Windows OS PDA's

Some one has to be screwing around with RIM or its there new software for the servers that they just released
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Mebsat
Posted: 52 months ago

There are plenty of things that could happen to the iPhone that would be just like this failure...

Let's say Visual Voicemail being offline... GASP!


But Visual Voicemail is not centrally served, it is on every ATT voicemail server, right? So while one server in a particular place might fail, which I have had happen with BellSouth, it would be isolated.

Is this a good assumption or is there some central component to Visual Voicemail?
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