On Monday, BlackBerry users found themselves without access to their emails for about three hours after RIM experienced a major service outage. The next day, RIM issued a statement explaining that a system upgrade was the root cause of the outage.
RIM’s customer base has rapidly been increasing and, in the last quarter alone, grew by 1.65 million new subscribers. RIM indicated that system capacity upgrades are done routinely without any disruption and that this upgrade was to have been no different.
Last April, RIM suffered a similar outage and again blamed an upgrade as the root cause. Aside from the argument for or against a centralized Network Operations Center, perhaps RIM needs to revisit the way it does system upgrades.
Like last time, RIM’s competitors were quick to point to this outage as a reason to select their products and services instead. For example, Palm posted an article called Why risk a network outage? on its blog the day after this latest RIM outage.