Another BlackBerry Outage…

There was another Blackberry outage starting yesterday.  This is the second outage in a week.  What’s going on, RIM?  It affected users email, data transfer and BBM (particularly tragic).  In August, Blackberry reported that it had 32 million subscribers and the outage is said to have affected 100% of its subscribers at one point.  Wow.

RIM released a statement this morning:

RIM Statement – December 23rd

A service interruption occurred Tuesday that affected BlackBerry customers in the Americas. Message delivery was delayed or intermittent during the service interruption. Phone service and SMS services on BlackBerry smartphones were unaffected. Root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure. RIM has taken corrective action to restore service.

RIM has also provided a new version of BlackBerry Messenger (version 5.0.0.57) and is encouraging anyone who downloaded or upgraded BlackBerry Messenger since December 14th to upgrade to this latest version which resolves the issue. RIM continues to monitor its systems to maintain normal service levels and apologizes for any inconvenience to customers.

So basically, BBM is bringing down the world.  I have to say, I’m not surprised.  For those unfamiliar with Blackberry Messaging, it is like an instant messaging program between Blackberry users.  It’s a definite plus to owning a Blackberry (assuming you have friends that own them as well), but it’s basically glorified text messaging.  Pretty remarkable that BBM could bring down the interface.

However, I have to say, I am getting pretty tired of these outages.  For an interface that so many people use, it should be more reliable…