Could RIM have Handled the Outage Better?

[Kevin Michaluk]

I just got off the phone with Wayne Rash over at eWeekly, and he raised a good point. He was wondering if I thought RIM had handled the outage well. Was there a good flow of communication, etc.

I want to know what everything thinks on this.

It seems to me that they were pretty quiet about it last night (I'm guessing they put all their resources into fixing the problem vs. telling people about it). From what I could tell, it seemed people really had to discover it on there on own, either from sites like CrackBerry.com, or by calling their provider, or by finding out from an IT admin or co-worker/colleague or someone else in the know.

Soo...
- did RIM handle it well?
- how did you find out about the outage?
- what should RIM do when this sort of event occurs?

[MMB916]

Actually, that is a good point. Last night when I was catching up on the news I noticed only ONE entry regarding the outage - It was around 11:30 PM Central Time. So I immediately posted it on the forum but frankly, I kept checking to see if it was a joke or untrue. I couldn't believe how little coverage there was on the issue.

I think there should have been information all over the Internet regarding an issue this big. I don't remember the last time RIM had this happen so I think it's important to communicate something like this as quickly as possible. Of course if they don't have a fix at that point, no problem, just say so and give some expectation. This will stop users from thinking something is wrong with their specific device and that they are alone with their problem!

[naviwilliams]

Am going to make this simple:

Why on earth did RIM / BlackBerry NOT have ANY details of this on their website? That's all I want to know. I knew nothing about this till about 05:45 - 06:00 this morning...

[audit]

1st off I'd wish that someone from RIM would get on the damn BB Outage list so when things like this happen, we're aware of it instead of waiting for the members to post an outage.

2nd, They should have a status page of their network in case something is wrong, we can view the network status page to see if it's RIM's issue or something else, that would save a lot of us some headaces.

3rd, NOT HOST THEIR NETWORK IN 1 LOCATION!!!!!!!!!!!! I mean how stupid is that? For a company that has some VERY high profile customers, they should have locations all over the globe in case something like this happens.

4th, DO NOT send out an e-mail to people to notify them that the service is down if it's going to their BB devices. Someone should be hung for that idea. When service came back up, I saw the e-mail come in and dropped my coffee cup, seriously I did drop it. How the [b][/b][b][/b][b][/b][b][/b] are people supposed to get the e-mail on their BB's when the service is down?

That's it for me, anymore and someone at the office will be calling 911 and I'll be offline again for a few days recovering.