Blackberry’s interruption result of upgrade to improve service

By Janine de Blois

The cause of the 3 hour interruption of its BlackBerry’s North American service on Monday was due to upgrade designed to increase capacity announced owner Research in Motion (RIM). Upgrades are routine and ongoing, rarely causing problems. In its nine year history Blackberry has had few outages. The last major one being in April 2007 and another nearly two years earlier.

This does not seem to calm some customers who are dependent on the service being available at all times. There was outrage expressed over the intermittent service delays.

“Everyone’s in crisis because they’re all picking away at their Blackberry’s and nothing’s happening,” Garth Turner, a member of the Canadian Parliament, said during a caucus meeting. “It’s almost like cutting the phone cables or a total collapse in telegraph lines a century ago. It just isolates people in a way that’s quite phenomenal.”
Albert Lin, an analyst at investment bank Sooner Cap says, “It’s hard to really expect any major service provider to be 100 percent reliable…When it comes to reliable push email … it’s still hard to find a solution that works better than BlackBerry.”

Queues cleared shortly after problem was fixed; no emails or data was lost. Voice and text message services were not affected. While Monday’s problems affected all wireless carriers, some users reported being able to access service normally.