E-mail Outage Agitates Users

Computerworld - The widespread BlackBerry outage in North America last week inconvenienced some corporate users of the popular wireless e-mail service. But what most irked them was the lack of an immediate explanation or frequent updates about the outage from BlackBerry vendor Research In Motion Ltd.

The outage began Tuesday evening, but RIM didnt issue a public statement acknowledging it until Wednesday afternoon  after the service had been restored. And it was late Thursday before the company explained that the problem was triggered by a flawed installation of cache optimization software and a subsequent system fail-over snafu.

The vendor apologized to BlackBerry users for the inconvenience. But customers such as David Maynor, chief technology officer at Errata Security LLC in Atlanta, sharply criticized RIM for its initial silence about the outage.

Im actually really mad about it, Maynor said on Wednesday. Im mad enough to switch to another service. Everyone makes mistakes, but [RIMs] cardinal sin is that they didnt inform their users.

Maynor, who has been a BlackBerry user for the past three years, said he lost his service from about 8:30 p.m. EDT last Tuesday until 10:30 a.m. Wednesday. He added that he couldnt get information about the outage from the BlackBerry Web site or his telecommunications carrier. Instead, he turned to online discussion forums.

On Friday, Maynor said he was still "outraged" about the situation. "If the power company were to fail, a more detailed analysis would be given," he said. "With the increasing number of mission-critical services dependent on the BlackBerry, I can't believe a software upgrade would cause such a massive failure."

Maynor said he doesn't think he will give up "completely" on RIM and the BlackBerry service. But he added that he plans to make sure Errata employees have multiple mobile e-mail options available to them so they aren't entirely reliant on one vendor.

John D. Halamka, CIO at both CareGroup HealthCare System and Harvard Medical School in Boston, said Friday that he was satisfied with RIMs explanation and apology. But he said he hopes that in the future, the vendor will be more proactive about acknowledging problems and communicating with their customers. Halamka pointed out that as of Friday morning, RIMs BlackBerry and corporate Web sites still had no information about the outage.

Earlier in the week, Halamka said that about 500 of his users lost BlackBerry service for 11 hours starting at 8 p.m. EDT Tuesday. The users were able to switch to cell phones and Web-based email during the outage, so they could continue to function at work, according to Halamka.