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April 18, 2007What Happens When Mobile Email Goes Down
Last night, when RIM had a system failure, reportedly cutting off mobile email service to all BlackBerry users in the Western Hemisphere, you can bet I felt it here at ebizQ.
Because I receive a lot of email every day, and because I commute to New Rochelle (37 minutes to and from Manhattan!), I certainly noticed the outage that reportedly started at about 8:15pm Eastern time, and ended sometime this morning, around 10:00am, I think. Ten hours overnight, the New York Times reports.
The outtage was apparently due primarily to a data backlog/system failure, and in this era where data management, integration, backup and recovery really affect our core business dealings, it could have been much worse. This kind of downtime, if it took place during an entire workday, or extended past 24 hours, would have been quite a lot worse.
RIM caught a lot of heat last night and today for not discussing the outtage publicly however, and even now, at 4:30pm, there's nothing on their website that discusses the failure. Following along the line that this is the "data era," it is also the Post-Enron transparency era, and lots of people were quite upset at RIM's lack of palpable response to its user base.
But I guess part of the problem with this situation, and even with the bandwidth problem, is that RIM has done very well lately and is extremely busy dealing with its increasing business, of which reliability is a cornerstone. But, like all large (and not so large) business these days, RIM probably is feeling the heat in terms of junk email. Spam is out of control, as ebizQ's Peter Schooff recently confirmed after he talked to Postini and they told him that spam accounts for something like 95% of all total email. This just goes to show that this kind of thing can happen to any enterprise, anywhere, and we are all potential victims.
According to InfoWorld, the outtage comes at a time of continued rapid growth for RIM:
"It added 1.02 million subscribers in the quarter ended March 3, for a total of approximately 8 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide. Revenue for the quarter was $930.4 million, up 66 percent from a year earlier. Net income for the quarter before adjustments was $187.9 million.""The rapid subscriber growth, plus the runaway junk e-mail boom, equals a disaster in the making," telecommunications analyst Jeff Kagan said in an e-mail analysis [also to InfoWorld]. Networks work fine until they reach their capacity, then all sorts of strange things happen."
I was interviewed about this today, as a CrackBerry user for the New York Times.. The Grey Lady, wow! I told them about how the outtage reminding me of the distant past.... like 2004. I'll link to it if it gets in!
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First, yes let me confess to being tethered to my blackberry. Yesterday's outage was bearable, because I was in my (home) office. Earlier this week during the Nor'easter, it was my only connection to the world.
Beyond the technology aspects, I thought it was interesting that RIMM's stock ended up $2.88 yesterday. The outage provided an opportunity for traders/investors to profit/participate in RIMM's rapid growth, and the Western Hemisphere's crackberry addiction.
Posted by: brenda michelson at April 19, 2007 07:46 AM
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