As a technical issue, the service outage may well be minor, and eventually forgotten by customers if RIM can fix the problem quickly. But in terms of optics, the timing is poor. As of Wednesday evening, BlackBerry service had been on the fritz throughout much of the world for three days, during a week when Apple’s new iPhone and mobile operating service are being released.
“[It] will take more than just a couple of collapses to persuade loyal consumers of BlackBerry services to look for alternatives,” said Informa Telecoms & Media analyst Malik Saadi. “Having said that, if RIM does not resolve the problem once and for all, the results could be disastrous for the company in a time where it has already disappointed the financial community.”
The outage appears to have started at one of RIM’s “Network Operating Centres” – the company-run servers through which BlackBerry traffic is routed. The company’s NOCs have long been one of its biggest selling points, because unlike other smart phone makers, RIM manages data traffic internally, rather than leaving it up to the individual phone carriers.
Normally, that means a highly reliable and secure means of data transmission, especially for business and government customers. But when a NOC malfunctions, a huge swath of users can see their service disrupted.
This isn’t the first time RIM has suffered temporary service disruptions in the past few years, and no other technology company is immune from such glitches. However, the fact that the service disruptions also affected users in overseas markets such as the Middle East and Asia, where most of RIM’s growth has been coming from, is a problem.
“Inexpensive, fast, private, reliable messaging is one of the primary considerations for BlackBerry buyers in these markets,” said RBC analyst Mike Abramsky, “and the anger generated by these outages could drive some consumers to evaluate alternative smart phones from Android or Apple.”
But not all BlackBerry users were upset.
“On the one hand it’s a relief because I don’t need to look at it every five minutes as I usually do,” said John Bitove, chairman of SiriusXM Canada, the satellite radio service. “Probably the only painful part is no BBM’s [messages on BlackBerry Messenger] – but on the other hand the kids away at university can’t ask me to send more money.”
