The Blackberry Internet Service went down on Monday at around 11 AM for users across the UK, Europe, Middle East and Africa. It was then fixed late that evening, and went down the next day.
Some users are still experiencing problems, with new outages being reported in Brazil, Chile and Argentina. After three days of on and off, Research in Motion have issued an official statement on why the service has gone down and what has taken them so long to fix it.
“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.”
The company has also reached out to mobile networks across the world to give them a more in-depth report of what they’re doing to fix the issue, and of their progress.
“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.
One of the key problems we can see from that is ‘BBM is impacted and many users are experiencing delays”. BBM is one of the main reasons that millions of people buy and use BlackBerry. It’s supposed to be instant, always on and always working. Outages such as this one don’t happen too often, but when they do, it frustrates and angers millions of users across the world.
Have you been affected by the BBM and BlackBerry Internet outage? Let us know if you’re still waiting to go back online, or if your ‘Berry is now working!
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