RIM Server Crash Leaves Millions Without BBM 191
Several readers have sent word that "tens of millions of BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa have been unable to receive or send emails and messages through their phones, following an outage at the server systems of parent company Research In Motion." RIM has confirmed that they're aware of the problem and working to restore service. A former RIM employee said to The Guardian, "They didn't start looking at scalability until about 2007, when they had around 8M active devices. The attitude was, 'We're going to grow and grow but making sure our infrastructure can support it isn't a priority.' They have their own clunky infrastructure to do something that you don't really need a clunky infrastructure to do anymore."
Re:Like Apple Messenger? (Score:4, Informative)
If they had simply used DNS names, they could fail-over on many levels simply by re-pointing DNS.
Maybe they were worried about DNS poisoning or something like that. Still should be a way to remotely update those "service book" addresses though.
Re:Single point of failure... (Score:4, Informative)
You are stuck with RIM service if you want a blackberry handset, you don't have a choice unless you switch to a different type of handset.
Complete nonsense. Even without RIM service, it still functions as a phone, internet access, and SMS text messaging. Basically everything you use a smartphone for. You just dont have access to the secure RIM enterprise data and messaging services. Neither does any non BB device, so basically the BB just downgrades to a standard smartphone.