Blackberry Outage

This column does not have a single author, but is submitted by a number of experts that contribute regularly to our news source.  Some are in Canada, some in the UK and one is in the far east

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A couple of Blackberry Outages have caused some questions for customers.  What happened is to be expected.  It's a complicated world.

The last outage may have been caused by some updates that some users opted to download from the Blackberry support site. 

We've tended to update ourselves or let ourselves be updated.  We place great trust in the quality control of our suppliers.  

They have a difficult problem in that they have to produce bug fixes and enhancements that do not disturb the customers.

What's involved?

Testing a device like the Blackberry is hard enough with all its variations and features, but they also have to  manage the huge disk server farms that they maintain for email service and application software.

As we've noted in the past it is one thing to have a server farm, it's quite another to keep it updated and backed up.  The amount of information generated is immense.

23/12/2009 08:59 PM

Blackberry is doing very well in a competitive market.  They don't need these outages as their customers are very dedicated.  Industry experts doubt that users will change to the competition because of the recent outages.

The real question is:  Can the current state of computer science keep up with the complexities of demand for service?  There are all sorts of difficulties involved.  The steep growth curve is accelerating now.  We've always been able to keep up.  Our guess is that we will