Blackberry’s Research in Motion is looking for ways to resolve the sudden outage of Blackberry services Worldwide. This problem started on Monday the 10th of October. It has lead to users not being able to make use of emails, messaging and Web service. At the moment over 10 million customers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and parts of South America are affected with this recent outage. Two days ago, RIM said it has resolved the issue, but millions of Blackberry subscribers came in to the reality that the issue might linger for more days before it can be resolved.
The company said in a statement that the issues experienced by its customers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina were caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure.
“Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested,” the company explained in the statement. “As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience and we will continue to keep you informed.”
This has brought about the voicing out of most infuriated customers through Facebook,Twitter and other socialnetworking sites, with some of them making up their mind to go for the iPhone or a device using the Andriod platform.
RIM’s Blackberry network architecture is its powerhouse but that is not to say that it doesn’t have its disadvantages. In fact because of the way the network architecture is being built, it can also exude a high degree of vulnerability. RIM directs all e-mail and messaging traffic through its Blackberry servers in network operation centers throughout the world which isn’t the same with other smartphone devices. An additional encryption and security can be added to the messages that transverse the network. The disadvantage is since there are single points of failure throughout the network, if peradventure there is a major infrastructure disruption, it could have an effect on the entire regions of service which is capable of putting off service for millions of subscribers.
