Remember the scheduled BlackBerry outage that Research in Motion was supposed to be having this passed Saturday morning? Well, thanks to “outstanding cooperation” on the part of RIM with Missouri’s emergency response community, the planned BlackBerry outage for database upgrades was postponed.
The request for not taking down BlackBerry service early Saturday morning didn’t come in from Homeland Security until late Friday afternoon. By RIM keeping the BlackBerry network up and running, emergency workers were able to communicate without missing a beat.
I know that I’ve said RIM didn’t have a clue as to how disruptive BlackBerry outages are. In this particular case, they clearly did, and, I applaud them.
After posting this, I am beginning to wonder if RIM will ever be able to have a planned outage to the extent that they take out an entire continent for four or five hours.
I won’t be surprised if we see RIM come up with an alternative to taking out their entire network for these database upgrades.