A global Blackberry service outage last week left millions around the world without Blackberry Messenger and email service.
The outage started as a server failure near London on Oct. 10, with the impacts spreading to the rest of Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and eventually the United States and Canada, with a total of four days of service interruption.
However, the majority of Blackberry users in the United States were not impacted for more than 10 hours. Of the roughly 70 million Blackberry subscribers, 15 million are U.S. citizens.
The outage did, however, impact CSULB students.
“[I’m] pissed off, but I don’t think they will let it happen again,” CSULB student Jay Waters said.
Another CSULB student who uses a Blackberry, Kevin Hampton, said he didn’t notice the service interruption.
“To be honest, I had no idea anything happened,” Hampton said.
Research in Motion (RIM), the parent company of Blackberry, blames the interruption on the failure of its “core switch,” the computer system that all the other servers connect to.
Normally, this would not have been a problem, but the back-up core switch failed to engage correctly, resulting in a chain reaction.
The hiccup comes at a particularly bad time for RIM, coinciding almost perfectly with the release of the iPhone 4S from Apple, both of which support the competing service “iMessage.”
RIM stock fell nearly 3 percent after the outage, and has not recovered, despite an apology from RIM founder and CEO Mike Lazaridis.
“You’ve depended on us for reliable, real-time communications, and right now we’re letting you down,” Lazaridis said.
RIM has not announced any plans to compensate its customers for the service failure.
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