Disruptive Telephony

If you are a Blackberry user (I am), you probably discovered sometime early this morning that you were not receiving email messages... and then you no doubt learned that pretty much all Blackberries in the entire Western hemisphere were offline since last night. For email, that is... they still worked as a phone, but I mean, you don't really get a Blackberry for the phone aspect. At this point, basically every major news outlet is covering the story, and I'm sure we can expect the stories to continue for quite some time.   The service seems to be back up now (mine is, anyway), but I'm sure it will take a bit for it to be restored everywhere.

Working in my home office today, I actually didn't notice the outage until I did one of my very occasional scans of Twitter and saw Chris Brogan complaining being stuck on a train without email access.   Knowing Chris, I figured I'd give him a quick call and was rewarded with this great quote about his trip around New York:

"Yeah, I was just in Penn Station and there were all these dudes in suits looking down at their hands and getting increasingly frantic!"  (Chris Brogan)

Indeed!  Given how much the financial industry (as well as the US government!) relies on Blackberries, I'm sure there were a heck of a lot of frantic calls being made all morning.

As a network technology geek, I'll be curious to see what information comes out later about the cause.  ComputerWorld is running speculation that it may have had to do with issues with one of RIM's Network Operations Centers (NOCs), but that is, at the moment, purely speculation and may be a red herring.  (Although it does raise another issue of why RIM has two NOCs that are both located in Canada.  With a global service such that they have, I would have thought that they would have gone for greater geographic distribution!)

In any event, something like this will definitely serve to remind people of how addicted they are to "push e-mail" and will undoubtedly cause larger customers to ask RIM serious questions about network availability (and perhaps to consider other alternatives).  Having some friends working at RIM (with whom I have not touched base), I can only hope they get it all sorted out rather soon.