BlackBerry PR debacle as blackout enters day three
As BlackBerry users contemplate a third day of disruption to the service, parent company Research In Motion faces criticism for not keeping customers informed over technical problems.
Millions of BlackBerry users around the world have been left without text communication services for a third day as maker Research in Motion struggled to fix what it said was a switching failure in its private network.
It has now emerged the outage has spread to North America.
Users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA) and India have already been affected by patchy email service and have had no access to browsing and messaging, ratcheting up negative sentiment towards a company which is already losing market share to Apple and Samsung.
RIM, which said on Tuesday that services had returned to normal, announced later the problems had actually spread beyond EMEA and India to Argentina, Brazil and Chile.
The company has communicated only intermittently with users via its @BlackBerry account on Twitter, where on Tuesday the company tweeted a brief explanation for the problem: “Message delays were caused by a core switch failure in RIM’s infrastructure. Now being resolved. Sorry for inconvenience.”
In a statement, Vodafone said: “BlackBerry subscribers may be experiencing ongoing issues with BlackBerry services in the UK and other countries. Research in Motion (RIM) has identified the issue, is clearing the backlog of data and is working to restore services as quickly as possible.”
It is unclear when the BlackBerry email service is likely to be back to normal.
No communication
Journalists have also faced difficulties getting more than basic information from RIM. There has also been no trace of an explanation on RIM’s website, with its press release page containing no mention of the current outages which began on Monday.
Claire Hopping, editor of Know Your Mobile, told Channel 4 News:”It looks like it has been left up to the phone networks to communicate with users.
“As a BlackBerry user myself, it would have been nice if they had communicated with me about what was going on.”
Channel 4 News asked RIM’s PR company for a response to that criticism but so far none has been forthcoming.
The service disruptions are the worst since an outage swept north America two years ago, and come as Apple prepares to put on sale its already sold-out iPhone 4S on Friday.
“It’s a blow upon a bruise. It comes at a bad time,” said Richard Windsor, global technology specialist at bank Nomura.
“One possibility could be that it encourages client companies to look more at other options such as allowing users to connect their own devices to the corporate server and save themselves the cost of buying everyone a BlackBerry.”
So what is causing the continuing problem with BlackBerrys? Simon Butler Microsoft Exchange consultant at Sembee Ltd told Channel 4 News.
What doesn’t go through the BlackBerry servers is the regular mobile phone traffic – so phone calls and text messages. Those wouldn’t be affected by the problems that RIM has been having, so people reporting issues with texts can’t lay the blame at RIM.
It could simply be that because BlackBerry messenger (BBM) is not available more texts are being sent and the mobile phone operators are processing more text messages – like the delays you get on new year’s eve at midnight.
However something like the iPhone doesn’t go through central servers, the traffic goes straight out on to the internet. Therefore there isn’t the single point of failure.
Problems with the iPhone would be restricted to a single service provider (Vodafone for example) or even a subset of their users. If the Apple app store was to have a problem it wouldn’t stop the device from doing most things like browsing the web, collecting email etc.