TENS OF millions of BlackBerry users around the world are being affected by the dramatic computer crash at the UK headquarters of Research In Motion (RIM) – makers of the device – in Berkshire, in the south of England this week.
The crash means that, at times, e-mails and messages cannot be sent or received. Web browsing is also intermittent.
Engineers in Berkshire have been working since 11am on Monday to try to restore the service after the equivalent of a “Chernobyl moment” – where an experiment with a crucial system went horribly wrong.
For the Russian nuclear reactor it was an after-hours test which blew the roof off the building and exposed its radioactive core; for RIM, it is understood, it was a botched attempt to upgrade the software and hardware which encrypts messages, e-mails and web traffic for users across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India. Such is the seriousness of the situation that RIM is now exposed to furious demands that it get its act together – or see customers desert it in the only regions where it had been seeing growth.
But the company’s attempts to fix the problem only seem to have made it worse. By midday yesterday the disruption had spread to North America – including Canada, RIM’s home country, where Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis founded the company in 1984. They are now the co-chief executives and co-chairmen of a business that once challenged Nokia as the leader in the smartphone business, but has recently seen its shares, revenues and profits all dropping as Apple and phones using Google’s Android software have taken over.
“The really worrying thing is that we don’t know how long it’s going to take,” said one business that deals with RIM. “They’re saying tomorrow morning – but they were saying that yesterday.”
The timing of the problems is made more embarrassing for RIM because it happened in the same week that Apple is releasing a major update to its mobile phone software, which brings a capability called “iMessage” to compete directly with RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger.
The danger is that, after this week, RIM’s reputation – among both young connected consumers and big corporations that each make up about half of its 70 million users worldwide – may also be permanently damaged.
“For big companies this can be crippling if they have people relying on their BlackBerry to get e-mail,” said Carolina Milanesi, smartphone analyst at the research company Gartner.
Ms Milanesi thinks big companies might be considering their options, as Apple’s iPhone has notably begun to make inroads into businesses that were previously RIM’s stronghold. The revelation that tens of millions of users are relying on a single system in Berkshire could have businesses reconsidering their reliance on it.
RIM however has said barely anything to explain the problem, issuing brief statements until yesterday morning Stephen Bates, its UK Ireland chief executive, told a group of developers: “We thought we had found the problem [that caused the outage] but had not. We are working around the clock to get to the bottom of the problem.” Sources with knowledge of RIM’s systems have suggested the problem has been brewing for years as its subscriber base has grown. Former staff have suggested that the company only began thinking about how to rewrite its core systems to deal with its massive growth in the past few years – and that the outage this week has been the result.
– (Guardian service)