Dec. 23, 2009

 

Research In Motion's BlackBerry network had a major outage this morning, which officials blamed on a flawed update of Messenger 5.x software.  Customers should only upgrade to the very latest Messenger 5.0.0.57 to avoid additional trouble, officials said today.

 

It was the second outage of the widespread mobile email service in the past week.

 

Consequences of the outage timing are mixed.  Many business customers are winding down operations for the winter holidays, so the service outage did not affect as many users as it could have during typical work hours. However, companies that depend on holiday revenue could be severely impacted.

 

RIM's lack of detailed explanations was a theme among industry bloggers and pundits today. Rather than just summarizing the problem and assuring short-term service restoration, a common refrain is that RIM should reveal more about its data backup procedures and long-term reliability plans.

 

Whether the company will do so is unknown: RIM's centralized radio network is its primary advantage, and acknowledging technical weaknesses could hurt the company by giving competitors a chance to make gains and investors a chance to withdraw.

 

The big winner may be enterprise backup companies, because at the least, enterprise customers are getting one more reason to save data for the holidays.