RIM fails to answer key questions about outage | Computerworld Hong Kong

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RIM fails to answer key questions about outage
 
By Antony Savvas | Oct 14, 2011

BlackBerry manufacturer RIM fails to answer a series of key technical questions about its catastrophic three day outage, though its email and BlackBerry Messager (BBM) have been up and running again.
 
In a letter to customers, Robin Bienfait, RIM's chief information officer, said email systems are operating and the company is continuing to clear any backlogged messages in the US, Canada, Latin America, and EMEIA (Europe, Middle East, India and Africa). BBM traffic is online and traffic is passing successfully in all these regions, he added.
 
Browsing was however temporarily unavailable in EMEIA as the company's support teams monitor service stability and continue to assess when the service can be safely brought online. Browsing was however available in the US, Canada, and Latin America except for customers serviced by three carrier networks in Latin America that use infrastructure in EMEIA, Bienfait said.
 
RIM hasn't found the problem
In spite of RIM issuing a statement Wednesday that a switch had caused the problems, Stephen Bates, the company's UK managing director, said staff at the Slough data centre did not know the cause. They "thought they had found the problem but had not", he said.
 
As the outage spread to the US and Canada, Computerworld UK asked RIM a series of questions about the outage, but received no response.
 
In spite of the three day outage hitting millions of customers around the world, RIM has not answered:
 
1) The exact nature and location of the problem
 
2) Which vendor made the switch device, if this was the cause
 
3) Where the failover site is located, and why a failover did not happen
 
It also failed to state if an upgrade preceded the problem. The Guardian newspaper reported recently that the initial outage may have followed a software upgrade to a RIM database that led to corruption problems. Attempts to switch back to an older version of the database led to a collapse, it suggested.
 
In 2008, a major RIM outage in the US disconnected 12 million BlackBerry customers. Following that incident there were criticisms that the large US customer base was too reliant on RIM's main data centre in Waterloo, Canada. In 2009, RIM opened an extra data centre in Texas and started building another one in Atlanta. Other regions appear to rely on the single data centre in the UK.
 
As Bates apologised at an 'innovation' event today to his seven million UK customers for the ongoing three day service outage, the company is facing growing calls for possible compensation for customers.