Blackberry users had a bit of a surprise this morning. Email was down. It came back up around 11 a.m. PST but in comparison to prior outages, this was a big one.
The Blackberry email outage spared most business users as enterprise servers were not affected. First problems were reported around 2:30 a.m. PST.
By mid-morning, the Twittersphere was a buzz with questions about their Blackberry service.
We thought it might be useful to show a history of Blackberry outages and reflect on their significance compared to today’s outage.
In 2007, RIM had a major outage. CEO Jim Balsillie said the outages would never happen again.
At the time, Balsillie did not have too much to worry about. They had a pretty tight grip on the market. The iPhone had been introduced in January but it was of little concern at the time. The biggest issue was making sure the company instituted some safeguards for government agencies and big enterprise customers.
In February 2008, RIM had another serious outage.
The outages ignited concerns but no real harm seemed to come of it.
Now comes today’s outage. The market is a far different place than one or two years ago.
According to comScore, more people use the iPhone than Microsoft devices. The Blackberry is still in first place with more than 14 million users.
But how long can the lead last for Blackberry with major outages like the one today?
The enterprise may be a different story but the lead there is not guaranteed. It’s not just email anymore. Apps are all the rage. So when email goes down for Blackberry, you know it has some real affects. Email is RIM’s crown jewel. If its reliability is questioned than it raises more interest among users in competing devices such as the iPhone or the Android.
