Gartner Slams RIM Over BlackBerry Outage

Responding to the recent three-day outage of Blackberry services, respected IT advisory firm Gartner has come down strongly on RIM. Terming the outage “highly inconvenient,” Vishal Tripathi, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner said, “It’s much more frustrating for enterprise users as it hampers productivity. This (outage) will further impact BlackBerry’s image in India. They should reach their customers more actively either through various communication modes or social media to allay consumer fears.”

Earlier today RIM finally woke up to the need to communicate clearly in the face of widespread outrage and scorn heaped on the company and admitted it had let users down. It perhaps came three days too late, but RIM CIO Robin Bienfait issued a statement addressing all BlackBerry customers, giving them a status update on services and seeking to answer questions and concerns raised by users.

“I want to first apologise for the service interruptions and delays many of you have been experiencing this week. I also wanted to connect with you directly, give you an update on the service issues we are trying to solve, and answer some of the questions and concerns you’ve expressed,” said Bienfait. “You’ve depended on us for reliable, real-time communications, and right now we’re letting you down. We are taking this very seriously and have people around the world working around the clock to address this situation. We believe we understand why this happened and we are working to restore normal service levels in all markets as quickly as we can,” he added.

According to the latest status update from RIM, there has been a significant improvement in service levels today. “In Europe, Middle East, India and Africa, we are seeing a significant increase in service levels. Service levels are also progressing well in the U.S., Canada and Latin America and we are seeing increased traffic throughput on most services, although there are still some delays and services levels may still vary amongst customers. Our global teams are continuing to work as quickly as possible to restore full and consistent service across all regions”

On Wednesday, for the third day running, many users in India were unable to receive e-mail or use BlackBerry Messenger or access the Internet on their BlackBerry smartphones. BlackBerry services throughout the globe seem to be have been affected by the glitch. On Tuesday RIM said that the outage was caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure. Although the system was designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested. As a result, a large backlog of data was generated.

A widespread hoax on BlackBerry Messenger further complicated matters for RIM and may have increased traffic levels when RIM managers were struggling to get things up and running. Many BBM users across the globe have got a BBM instant message from friends that states: “This is the real broadcast from Blackberry All rights reserved. Broadcast this message to every single contact on your BBM to reset your display picture, sorry for any inconvenience. This message is to inform all of our users, that our servers have recently been really full, so we are asking for your help to fix this problem. We need our active users to re-send this message to everyone on your contact list in order to confirm our active users that use BlackBerry Messenger, if you do not send this message to all your BlackBerry Messenger contacts then your account will remain inactive with the consequence of losing all your contacts Symbol will automatic update in your BBM ,when you broadcast this message. Your blackberry will be updated within 24 hours it will have a new lay out and a new color for chat.”

As we’ve said before, while one serious outage is bad enough for a company whose USP is industrial strength service quality that corporate IT departments love, three consecutive days of service outages and a non-existent crisis management strategy where it has taken RIM three days to respond clearly has severely dented RIM’s BlackBerry brand. The long-term effects of this outage remain to be seen.