RIM encountered unfortunate timing Monday as it and users reported a major international outage. Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East have all reported losing BlackBerry Internet Service features, such as e-mail, messaging, and even BlackBerry App World. As of mid-day, RIM had been working on the problem but didn’t have a solution.
A handful of users report e-mail working, but this may be limited.
The flaw arrives just a few days before the iPhone 4S launches and may hurt RIM’s chances at keeping BlackBerry users who might have been considering a switch. By its need to route data through a central server, the BlackBerry creates an inherent single point of failure. An outage at a RIM server takes down multiple basic services, even if they represent third-party mail that otherwise doesn’t need RIM’s support.
Both Android and iOS don’t have the tightened security and data compression of the BlackBerry but, because they access third-party services directly, are less likely to see large-scale failures.
