RIM's silence on BlackBerry outage betrays crisis of leadership

A glaring highlight of what is now a service outage across four continents for the third consecutive day is the complete and shocking silence on the part of RIM’s top management across the globe. Jim Balsillie, RIM co-CEO was in Dubai on Monday, where he launched BlackBerry Tag at GITEX. And it was on Monday that the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions in addition to India started facing severe service disruptions. Yet, there’s been a glaring silence from Balsillie. Incidentally, EMEA and India are the regions where RIM is doing well even as it bleeds in its primary US market. Closer home, there’s been no official statement from Frenny Bawa, Managing Director for RIM India, who incidentally is not based in India, but in Singapore. RIM’s global press site too has no mention of what is now a 3-day downturn and has left the company’s proud reputation for enterprise-grade services in tatters. RIM India doesn’t have an independent press page, merely forwarding to the global US site. [caption id=“attachment_106186” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Mike Lazaridis, president and co-chief executive officer of Research in Motion, speaks at the RIM Blackberry developers conference in San Francisco, in 2010. Robert Galbraith/Reuters”]  [/caption] It’s not like RIM has amateurs handling media relations — RIM India’s media managers are thorough professionals, respected among media, and with years of experience handling a variety of crisis situations. Yet, the fact remains that besides the staid, extremely brief media statements that hide more than they reveal, RIM India hasn’t done anything. It would seem as if RIM India’s hands are tied and they are not getting the requisite information and support from their global counterparts, since the outage is happening because of problems at data centres outside of India. A source at a telecom operator said on the condition of anonymity that RIM India managers were extremely frustrated with the situation as they were fire fighting without clear information. For instance, operators were told that the issue would be sorted by early this morning, but till evening, the issue continues. What’s worse is the nature of the outage. For some users, everything has come to a standstill. For others e-mail works but BlackBerry Messenger is down. For yet others, e-mail comes in bursts every few hours and outgoing e-mails don’t go from the device. It’s clear that telecom operators who are at the frontlines of customer service and bearing the brunt of user frustration will haul RIM over the coals for this 3-day outage that has clearly demonstrated that RIM’s claims of providing an enterprise-class service are quite hollow. Imagine if your bank experienced a 3-day outage where all systems went down and no transactions happened, no money could be withdrawn, etc. Not many customers would be eager to bank with such an organisation. And when the telecom operators pressurise RIM and extract their pound of flesh, the beleaguered smartphone maker may need to give way, especially on the margins front, and that could hurt its already sagging bottom line even further.