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- BlackBerry Outage Frustrates Users Again
February 12, 2008
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080212/blackberry_outage.html?.v=9- Officials with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless said RIM told them the outage hit customers of all wireless carriers. Bell Canada spokesman Jason Laszlo said the majority of its BlackBerry customers were affected. The last major BlackBerry outage struck in April, when a minor software upgrade crashed the system, triggering complaints from always-on users all the way up to the White House and Canada's Parliament. A smaller disruption occurred in September, when a software glitch stanched the flow of e-mails
What is the process during wireless communications? As cell phone users know, unless a tower is nearby, in
clear range, the phone call can be garbled or dropped. Something as simple as passing behind a building or
driving into a valley can drop the call. Once received at a tower, satellites are often used, leaping over the
miles to go directly to a server that will deliver the call. Where phone calls can take a sputtering in the
message, digital messages are more sensitive. Digital messages require leading and closing codes to be intact,
for instance. A text message might have a header stating it is beginning, and who it is to be delivered to. At the
end, the message might have a trailer stating the message is complete. If the header or trailer are corrupted, the
text message is aborted, being considered incomplete. Phone calls require, in point of fact, only the header, as
a dropped call can be considered the trailer. Phone calls are more simplistic, as sputtering during the call is
suffered without interrupting the call. With digital communications, sputtering is an interruption in the codes
required for the communication to continue. Surfing the web is likewise more complicated than simple phone
calls. Web pages are built of many components, which are assembled. If a necessary component is missing or
corrupted during a transmission, the web page build stalls.
In the days before Planet X arrived in the inner solar system in 2003, problems with wireless communications
were technical, solely. But these times have and are changing at a rapid pace. In August-September of 2003
there were brownouts and blackouts and surges worldwide, creating the New York City blackout on August
14, 2003. On September 1, 2003 there were massive blackouts in Malaysia and Australia, following on
September 2 by brownouts on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. On September 4, 2003 London had blackouts.
On September 9, 2003 blackouts occurred in Finland and Russia. This was a time when the Second Sun was
much in evidence during sunrise and sunset. Planet X had arrived. While putting on the brakes as it
approached the Sun, Planet X caused its massive charged tail to waft past the Sun to Earth, thus causing
brownouts and blackouts. In 2003, the Earth had a taste of what the charged tail can do, but mankind's
electronics are not braced for the continuous barrage that it is about to receive. If a charged cloud can create a
surge or brownout in an electrical grid on the surface of the Earth, what can it do to electronic
communications temporarily in the air? Wireless communications are very vulnerable, in the days to come.
- Major Blackberry Outage
Feb 23, 2005
http://www.blackberrycool.com/2005/02/23/00212/- Seems like the outage is due to an internal issue at RIM with their SRP server that affected most of the Blackberry subscribers.
- Major BlackBerry Outage Leaves Millions Without E-Mail
April 18, 2007
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=3052158- Millions of BlackBerry users in North America were without e-mail because of a massive network failure. Research in Motion, the maker of BlackBerry devices, has said very little about the incident except that the outage "may have been caused" by one of its operating centers going down.
- Widespread BlackBerry outage?
September 7, 2007
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2007/09/07/widespread-blackberry-outage/- And we thought these things were a thing of the past. It seems that BlackBerry users on all networks are experiencing a complete data outage. If the outage is as widespread as the initial reports seem to indicate, this could mark the second time in a year that the BlackBerry users have been subjected to such an event.