BlackBerry users hit by eight-hour outage

[47of74]

Source: CNN

(CNN) -- BlackBerry customers throughout North America were without e-mail and Internet services for more than eight hours after a widespread outage that lasted until early Wednesday.

Customers began receiving e-mails again around 2:45 a.m. ET. Initial reports of outages came from BlackBerry around 6:30 p.m.

BlackBerry did not give a reason for the outage. It was the second such outage for users in less than a week.

At one point, BlackBerry estimated 100 percent of its customers in North America were affected by the outage, according to an e-mail sent to customers.

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/23/blackberry.outage/index.html

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I had that problem too last night. I thought it was my Storm at first that was the problem and rebooted it not once but several times trying to get stuff to work. Come to find out later the problem was on the other end.

[WriteDown]

1. Attack by Apple?

:)

[Midwest_Doc]

7. I love my iPhone n/t

[WriteDown]

9. I did until Monday!

I updated my software to version 3.1.2 and now I can't make any calls. Does everything else except the "phone" part.

[Occulus]

23. Did you jailbreak or unlock prior to your 3.1.2 update?

That might be the problem....

[WriteDown]

24. No...

I seem to be one of the few people I know who HASN'T jailbroken his phone.

[WriteDown]

2. Dupe

:)

[snooper2]

3. shit happens :)

that's why all major networks claim 99.99% availability...

It's impossible to have 100% uptime, period...

[boppers]

21. 5 nines is doable.

Eight hours of outage is technical incompetence.

[snooper2]

27. in 1999 I was working at WorldCom...

we had the great frame relay outage for about 60 hours. It was a cascading ( no pun since Cascade was the company who made the switches ) affect. The whole network crashed and when a switch tried to recovery and the HSSI links became active on the trunk cards they would become overloaded with re-route requests. We had to isolate markets and take down around 40 intermachine trunks across the country and then in Chicago isoloate all the switches themselves. It was a bitch to get the network stable again and a lot of lab testing after the fact with Cascade ( who was bought buy Lucent FYI ) to get to the root cause. If I remember correctly the nightmare was triggered by a PRAM sync of one of the processer cards on a Chicago switch; a common event that was done in the network.

so shit does happen...and sometimes it takes a lot of troublehsooting to get to the root cause...

[boppers]

32. Don't recall that one, but I do recall the east coast AT&T one...

Sounds like (in both cases) it could have been adverted by having a duplicate, equal capacity, isolated shadow network.

Of course, that's expensive as all get out, so people shoot for three of four nines instead.

[Buzz Clik]

4. Yeah, I noticed, but I didn't care. I hate getting work emails at home.

[seemunkee]

5. Our CEO is calling us about this

He hates IT as it is so any problems are, of course, our fault. He's at his home in Japan so he is calling his admin at 11PM and wants him to tell IT there is a problem with email.

[WriteDown]

10. Nonsense...

Everyone knows that Japanese CEO's are good people unlike our American CEO's and would never do such a thing.

[seemunkee]

12. Never work for a Samurai

We keep our heads low around here.

[WriteDown]

13. I've heard stories..

I don't think many realize what Japanese businessmen are like.

[MuseRider]

6. I too thought it was my Storm.

My last Storm went belly up with the latest upgrade for some reason that nobody could figure out so they gave me a new one (a new Storm One). I reinstalled all my stuff and it was something that I had before because it crapped this one out too. Got it fixed and was more careful but had been having problems with a few things since I got it going. I figured it was me or the Storm until I realized I also could not get Internet service. Up and running this morning, getting mail but have not tried to send any yet. I hope it stays good because with this storm coming I might need to rely on it for everything. :-)

[47of74]

17. I'm on my 2nd storm

I bricked the first one when I tried to upgrade it to 5.0 and the download got corrupted. At least Verizon gave me another Storm at no charge. I was doing backups on a regular basis so I was able to restore most of my data to the phone and had it going like I wanted within a couple hours.

[MuseRider]

19. Yup, that is what happened to me.

I love my storm. As much as I hate to admit it, Verizon has been very good to me. I got my Storm the first day they were available but I was not due for an upgrade but they did it anyway and figured out a way that I could get it at the cheaper price.

[AngryAmish]

8. I was worried - my Blackberry is 3 years old

I'm buying a droid after the holidays. Nothing against Blackberry but I think Droid is better - and on Verizon!

[MuseRider]

20. I played with one of those

and I have to say they are very cool. Enjoy. I think I will stick with BB. I have never had a more stable system and the phones are very good. Still, those Droids are amazing!

[47of74]

22. Much as I love my Storm

I'd have an iPhone right now if it wasn't for the fact that here in the states there is one and only one carrier that supplies them. A carrier that has crap for coverage in Iowa.

[shadowknows69]

11. Oh Noes!!! How will they cope?

Man, our civilization is screwed if suddenly all the lights go out.

[Renew Deal]

14. I have a story for you.

This is like 5 years ago. I used to work at a company where the head lawyer never used his computer. He still dictated to his assistant. The CEO pushed him to get a Blackberry. I set it up for him. 24 hours later the device was dead. It was defective (fatal software error). This guy went crazy because he couldn't access his email. He never used a computer, but he was hooked to a blackberry in a day! :crazy:

[LuckyLib]

15. With those "crackberries" down, there must have been lots of folks in withdrawal.

[rainbow4321]

26. A friend of mine did..

Too funny, she said later that she was going thru (BB) withdrawl symptoms cuz she was at work and couldn't get BB access.
I always surf the 'net via my BB as I ride the bus/train home and was getting pretty damn frustrated. I didn't know at the time about the widespread outage.

[Codeine]

16. meh. I still got my texts and Tweets.

That's all I care about anymore. Email is almost an iritation at this point.

[47of74]

18. Texting

I don't get too many texts, but I do send a few. Most of them mainly when I want to update Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace all in one shot. The text service worked ok in the outage. My phone's twitter client (UberTwitter) didn't work during the outage.

[Codeine]

29. I have my Twitter stuff done via text.

No need to run an extra app that way.

[rainbow4321]

25. My texts went thru..

But I couldn't access the 'Net. I even took out/put back in the battery thinking it was my phone having issues!

[47of74]

30. That's what I was doing

[yurbud]

28. I lost my address book, ability to send email, bookmarks, and some settings

[Trajan]

31. Hah ... Everybody does the same thing ...

What ? .... I am NOT getting internet access again ? .... All the bars are there, but no arrows ??? ....

Something must be wrong with my phone ... Better pull out the battery and RESET this bugger ....

Oh .... still dont work ?? ... Damn!

What I want to know is: When did RIM send emails to anyone ? .... I went to try to check network status to
see if their system went down (obviously, it did), and I could find nothing ...

I didn't get any email notice from either Verizon OR RIM ...

Works now, though ...