Why Your Blackberry Crashed

Did you miss your Blackberry yesterday? You weren't the only one and here's why and what you can do about it.

According to an article in the LA Times, yesterday's four-hour RIM outage blanketed the America, but didn't affect parts of Europe.

The cause likely has to do with a pair of redundant IP address paths in North America. PC World reports that diagnostic tests from Zenprise, a company whose service-management software troubleshoots BlackBerrys, showed that

one IP address was refusing connections to come through, causing enterprise users to be impacted; users of the working IP would not have been affected, and if your service has been intermittent, that could be explained by a switch between the two IP addresses.

Blackberry users know all about outages. Last April, the second strike came in the form of another shutdown on the RIM network.

Had this been a voice service, enterprises would be in an uproar. No PBX could afford to crash for 53 minutes of downtime a year let alone eight or nine hours. A study that Strategic Technology Analytics worked on with Osterman Research shows that only 12.7% of messaging users would find that 8.8 hours of downtime per year (99.5% uptime) to be very satisfied or "extremely satisfied"as opposed to 62% at 53 minutes per year and 93% at five minutes per year.

It's time that enterprise reevaluate their mobile messaging strategy. Mobile e-mail has become to valuable to put all of their eggs in one basket. Companies need to diversify, and spread workforces across multiple email service providers so they can use that leverage with RIM to insist on uptime SLA.

IT leaders might have had an excuse at one time for letting RIM slide by, but that's no longer the case. Two outages are two much. One more time and you could be the one out of the game.