[Buzz_Dengue]

BlackBerry reports problems in Europe, Middle East

Published: October 10, 2011 10:42 AM By The Associated Press

LONDON - (AP) -- "The maker of BlackBerry says it's investigating an unidentified issue affecting customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Research in Motion Ltd. gave few further details Monday, but telephone companies whose customers use the company's smartphones said that Internet access and BlackBerry's popular messenger service appeared to be affected." ( ...excerpted... story below...)

BlackBerry reports problems in Europe, Middle East

I was aware of retaliatory threats from hacker/black hat groups in the wake of the post-London fiasco...
what are the odds there in Slough? I would assume RIM is obligated to disclose any breaches... or not?

... Fox News

"The problem appears to have originated from a downed data center in Slough, UK, which handles Blackberry services for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. RIM confirmed the service outage on its UK Twitter stream.
�Some users in EMEA are experiencing issues,� the company tweeted. �We're investigating, and we apologise for any inconvenience.�
A subsequent statement said Blackberry was "working to resolve an issue currently impacting some Blackberry subscribers in Europe Middle East and Africa."
Mobile carriers were quick to blame RIM for the glitch."
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/...ons-worldwide/

System redundancy will handle minor glitches... the magnitude of this event makes me believe the server farm in Slough was willingly taken down by RIM to avoid DOS breach/damage, as I curl up in a corner, fetal position, in my paranoid delusional world... remember...
just because you're paranoid, doesn't automatically mean that they aren't out to get you!

But rest assured, I am sure they are working hard to do the right things for the consumer.

And by coincidence (?)...
"The outage occurred as RIM's co-CEO Jim Balsillie and other executives were in Dubai for the annual GITEX electronics show"
BlackBerry Problems Reported: Services Down In Europe, Middle East, Africa

... and today is the "BBM Hack-a-thon" in Chi-town...
------------
Chicago
When: Oct. 10th and 11th
Where: Courtyard Chicago Downtown/Magnificent Mile, 165 East Ontario Street
------------

Some good libation-laced conversations today/tonight over today's events, I would assume...

[MADBRADNYC]

Why is BGR reporting this as "BUG"?
The servers are down.... Inconvenient but things happen....
They seem to want to inject a bit of RIM "insecurity" in the matter...

And from the comments there, it seems some are feeding into it.

BGR is very noticeable in their "subversive" reporting...

BlackBerry bug knocks millions of users offline in Europe, Middle East and Africa

[Buzz_Dengue]

According to paidContent�s Ingrid Lunden, RIM isn�t ruling out potential hacking as a cause of the outage. Right now, though, all O�Neill would say is that �the fundamental cause as far as we know is the issue with the core switch and a failing in the component architecture� and that �it has to do with how our networks speak to each other, and we are trying to fix that while preserving all messages.�
http://www.slashgear.com/blackberry-outage-hits-americas-as-rim-admits-bafflement-12187585/


When is RIM going to issue an official press release to give us the official word on the system status? Why are they waiting? This type of outage just doesn't happen... and not only happens, but propagates across the system.

If this does turn out to be all in-house, equipment/software caused, that is even worse news than if it was induced by a hacktivist group...

[qbnkelt]

RIM's lack of communication regarding this outage will damage them deeply. This mishandling will cost them dearly. I can understand tech failure, but this silence is inappropriate.
This is not the time to go underground.

[adrenaline_x]

Really?

PS3 network was offline for 2 month and continued to sell consoles.

Hopefully its not a hack.

I suspect is has to do with BIS 4.1 Rolling out and updates to support the Playbook os 2.0 and QNX demo phones.

[Accidental Post]

Even if it is a hack does anyone think that RIM would ever admit it???

If it is and they do admit it it would be game over in Waterloo.

[NickA]

RIM's lack of communication regarding this outage will damage them deeply. This mishandling will cost them dearly.

Doubt it. When Gmail goes down, even for 5 minutes, the world is in a tizzy and it becomes more important than the national debt and poor economy. This outage is minor compared to that.

It's technology. Things happen, that's just how it is and how it's always going to be.

[AugustArborists]

I don't know, I was wondering about a DOS attack, Sony is being hit again today...

Sony Hack October 2011: Thousands Of PlayStation Network Accounts Targeted By Massive Attack

[qbnkelt]

Don't get me wrong. I'm not piling on the hate. I'm stating that they are mishandling the communication of what is going wrong.
I know tech goes awry.
One point about the playstations - they're *play* stations. This is communications, personal and possibly business....although my BES is not affected.

[Blacklac]

RIM's lack of communication regarding this outage will damage them deeply. This mishandling will cost them dearly. I can understand tech failure, but this silence is inappropriate.
This is not the time to go underground.

How so? Its on their website.

uk.blackberry.com/serviceupdate/

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[lnichols]

RIM's lack of communication regarding this outage will damage them deeply. This mishandling will cost them dearly. I can understand tech failure, but this silence is inappropriate.
This is not the time to go underground.

Unfortunately silence seems to be RIM's MO as of late. This outage they are quiet. All summer on the Playbook and "end of summer" deliverable and they were quiet until the conference call shortly before and then saying that they would miss the mark with no justification. Late on the new phones and again silence until investors meeting and they basically lied saying carriers were holding them up when it appears that the real reason was a manufacturing issue. Of course even if they were to speak out I'm not sure that the double talk mumbo jumbo that they usually spew out would be of much help to them.

RIM for a company that facilitates communications, you are horrible at communicating!

[Blacklac]

RIM doesn't owe us any info on future features or devices, though. Just because info was freely leaked for years doesn't mean it will continue to or that they cannot change that. They obviously felt it was better for business to keep everything hush hush like almost every other cell company has been doing, instead of letting everyone (including competition) know what was coming 6 months in advance. I'm not saying PB/QNX development hasn't been annoyingly slow, but given how bad companies are ridiculed for missing dates, I don't blame them. Unforeseen issues occur all the time. :/

The fact that they are keeping everyone updated on their website about this outage shows its not as bad as people are crying. Its as if people want them to come to their door and give them some working replacement phone until its fixed. I don't think its out of the ordinary for them to not give specific details until its been completely resolved, that could make them open to other risks.

Not saying this isn't frustrating, but people are blowing this way out of proportion. Enjoy a few days unplugged and find other ways to check email and IM for a bit. Life goes on.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[Skeevecr]

Don't get me wrong. I'm not piling on the hate. I'm stating that they are mishandling the communication of what is going wrong.

They issued notifications on their site and did interviews on tv in europe and beyond, what more should they have done?

They haven't issued a definitive statement on what caused the problems yet, but that would probably have something to do with them needing to do a complete investigation to establish whether or not it was simply a hardware issue or something more.

[allengeorge]

I think that RIM should have been more proactive in informing users of the situation. They should have worked with their carrier partners to deliver at least a few critical service updates to BBs so that people were appraised of the situation. As it stands, most people were informed via the media, and RIM was extremely close-mouthed until they realized that the disruption couldn't be resolved in a couple of hours.

I'm also surprised that Mike L. was 'personally' overseeing the team dealing with this issue: I would imagine that that's counterproductive and unnecessary. And finally, I hope that the RIM backend team really looks into their message-handling/routing/networking architecture. I'd always imagined that systems of RIM's scale had clustered components composed of 'unreliable' nodes. Typically in such systems the failure of a node should not cause the entire system to go down; that it did is a serious problem.

[Superfly_FR]

RIM insists BlackBerry outage not due to hacking, users won’t lose messages - SlashGear

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/370501/r...e-for-recovery