Satisfaction with BlackBerry crumbles as server problems keep users in dark
Company could lose the confidence of businesses after high-profile customers voice irritation at outage
Charles Arthur and Juliette Garside
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 12 October 2011 19.39 BST
Lisa Simpson took her BlackBerry with her on Tuesday evening when she went to help out at the Brownies in her Devon home town: she was hoping to get a confirmation from a new client for whom she could provide her freelance translation services. No message came – but when she got home there was an email on her computer saying "As you didn't reply, we had to give the work to someone else."
Simpson, who missed out on £300 of new work – "particularly disappointing, because they would have been a new client" – is one of tens of millions around the globe suffering the side-effects of a dramatic computer crash at the UK headquarters of Research In Motion (RIM) in Slough, Berkshire, this week.
The crash means that, at times, emails and messages cannot be sent or received. Web browsing is also intermittent.
Consumers such as Simpson have not been the only ones affected: for thousand of bankers around Europe awaiting the latest news about the euro, silence has not been golden. Their BlackBerrys have at times not been relaying messages.
Engineers at the Slough base 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 goes 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, the Guardian understands, it was a botched attempt to upgrade the software and hardware which encrypts messages, emails and web traffic for users across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India, and which has now exposed RIM 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 on Wednesday 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 email," said Carolina Milanesi, smartphone analyst at the research company Gartner – who says she is relieved that she is not travelling on Thursday: "company policy is that we have to use a BlackBerry for email. I would be scrambling to get to a wireless connection so I could use my iPhone."
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 Slough could have businesses reconsidering their reliance on it.
The encryption of messages, and RIM's private system which avoids international roaming costs, had made BlackBerry highly attractive both to businesses and consumers. But on Wednesday users such as Alastair Campbell and the cricketer Kevin Pietersen expressed anger at the delay. Campbell criticised RIM's silence, and inadvertently coined a new word: "day 3 of blackberry black-out," he tweeted.
"Some free advice. Explain while you fix. Apologise when you have. Recompense after. handling so far woefuk." (Later, he added: "Woefuk was indeed a typing error. If it catches on, I will claim it.")
Pietersen threatened to change phone – a move that a number said they were considering.
RIM however has said barely anything to explain the problem, issuing brief statements until on Wednesday 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."
He added: "We are working night and day to solve the outage. Our apologies to all our customers." The delays, he said, were "not acceptable", and the "server issues are regarded with high focus". RIM, he said, "is not going to stop until they get to the end 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. In mid-2007, when the introduction of Apple's iPhone helped drive the explosion in smartphone sales, RIM had 5.5 million subscribers. At the end of this August it had 70 million, a 12-fold growth.
But 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. Simpson said she would be prepared to stick with RIM – for now. "I'm really anti-iPhone. I think the BlackBerry's fantastic. I'm giving them one week. If it carries on then I might have to get an Android phone."
Satisfaction with BlackBerry crumbles as server problems keep users in dark | Technology | The Guardian
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the "server issues are regarded with high focus"
Well that's an understatement if there ever was one. They're probably running and screaming and sacrificing their first-born to the Great Old Ones. I interviewed for a job at RIM a while back, I would have been in the thick of this.
Satisfaction with BlackBerry crumbles as server problems keep users in dark
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