Many of you know that I am one of the biggest BlackBerry fans out there. Heck, we’ve blogged about the darned things just about every day for the passed three years. I, however, have taken issue with the number of times RIM has had some type of BlackBerry outage over the passed year and it would appear that I am not alone…
Research in Motion has had so many BlackBerry outages and, in my opinion, done such a poor job of notifying the public when they are experiencing issues, that a group of BlackBerry using individuals have banded together to form RIMOutages.com, home of the the BB-Outage mail list.
BB-Outage is a mail list for people to notify others if RIM’s data service or a carriers data service is down in a particular area. If Data Service is down in China, USA, A particular state, city, country, etc., for people then post the area to the list so others are notified. It’s probably best to subscribe from an address that’s not associated with your Blackberry since if RIM’s data service is down, you won’t get the e-mail anyhow.
This is kind of a cool idea. It’s sad, however, that it is necessary.
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iPhone. The ultimate holiday gift.
Not for Helen Keller
It’s a darn good service, actually. It’s like a first-line defense for RIM. If there is or is not an outage, it saves calls to the carriers and to RIM for users to look to this http://www.rimoutages.com list to see if it’s up or down.
I’m betting RIM might appreciate the help!
Domain name has been changed over to dataoutages.com to keep the peace.
Nice service. It’s obvious the Blackberry community is growing to create such services. Shame BB didn’t do it themselves.
“We’ve changed the domain over to Dataoutages.com.” Sounds like RIM had a talk with them. More denial it seems.
“It wasn’t a capacity issue, it wasn’t a security issue. It was an outage overnight when there was an upgrade,” said Co-CEO of RIM, Jim Balsillie. “I think it’s pretty likely that the systems are in place that this kind of thing, as incredibly unlikely as it is to happen, is all the more unlikely to happen again.”
Mr Balsillie said the outage like the one experienced at RIM were “very rare” these daya in the context of modern software platforms and said it was extremely unlikely to happen again.
Balsillie: BlackBerry Shutdown Will Never Happen Again
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2128963,00.asp
Here is more denial:
“The browser on the BlackBerry smartphone is now very close to what you get on your PC,” says Sanjay Kalyanasundaram, Technical Product Manager. “It makes the mobile experience all that more useful and rewarding.”
Who knew Waterloo, Ontario is really fantasy land…..
iPhone. The ultimate holiday gift.
The name change was a voluntary change to avoid any problems that may arise with RIM PR
@ RIM does do it themselves, but only for their “premiere” services ie paid enterprise admins..etc..etc
Sounds like RIM had a talk with them. More denial it seems.
As Bla1ze mentioned, we changed the domain to keep the peace and to avoid any issues that the name may have caused.
We have added 2 more admin’s to the lists to help run it and a couple more moderators to help keep the noise down. The list isn’t a shot at RIM and never will be. The new name just gives us more room for additional lists.
Thank You for everyone that has supported us so far and continue to do so.
While I understand servers can crash, etc., there is nothing on the Blackberry website explaining the outage to customers. Even the power company goes public with explanations and estimates of service restoration. I’ve liked the Blackberry service since subscribing 2 years ago, but 3 outages in the past week have been frustrating. As a freelancer, I get a jump on available work by being able to respond nearly instantly to e-mails via my smart phone. It defeats the purpose if I have to fire up my laptop, find a wi-fi connection someplace and check e-mails from a fixed location.