Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Where were you when the Blackberries Stopped?

There will be conversations all over the US about the nights the lights went. No not the New York black out but the service outage suffered by Blackberry. On Tuesday night, five million BlackBerry users in the United States were logged off their cherished service. It took 10 long hours before the service was fully resumed. What was the implications of this on the service, its users and the rest of civilisation? After all it was outside normal working hours and resolved before the next working day.

The dependence we all have to email and the blackberry users have to their cherished machines is now clearly beyond working hours. BlackBerry services, shed little light yesterday on what went wrong, releasing a statement that said the “root cause is currently under review.” But it is thought that part of the problem, though, could be the service’s rapid growth: R.I.M. says it has added three million subscribers in the last 12 months, for a total of eight million, in part because of the popularity of its superslim BlackBerry Pearl.

We are left to wonder whether there will be a baby boom in 9 months.