Blackberry problems caused by hardware/software failures

Research In Motion have had a tough week as their customer base have experienced problems with many of their networking services. Internal investigations have been ongoing, trying to find the source of the widespread problems. According to industry sources in connection with the Telegraph it would appear that the reasons are now emerging.

The problems seemed to start around 10am on Monday when mobile networks were seeing that Blackberry internet traffic was dwindling. RIM executives confirmed that problems had started.

The Telegraph add “RIM’s investigation revealed the apparent cause of the outage to be a failed Cisco switch in its core network. Switches are basic components of Internet Protocol networks. They are specialised computers that direct communications within networks; in this case the emails, web browsing and instant messages of millions BlackBerry Internet Service users.

iPhone lurking in the background ...

On day three of the crisis, RIM publicly admitted it had suffered a “core switch failure”.”

To make matters worse however, the backup system also failed. There are no reasons made public yet as to how this happened, although you can be sure that behind the scenes RIM are making sure it won’t happen again.

The report continues “After Monday’s morning’s collapse, RIM’s engineers decided to revert the software running the switching infrastructure to the pre-upgrade version. This meant the Internet Protocol backbone of the BlackBerry network in Europe, the Middle East and Africa had to be rebuilt from scratch. Effectively reset, the switches and routers had to learn where they were within the network and how to talk to each other again.”

This could have been fixed relatively quickly, but apparently the Oracle database was corrupted. Without this central database the system won’t work as it handles emails and messaging. RIM then had to hotfix the system while it was running. Most people know that working with a database while it is running, isn’t the most simple of processes.

Blackberry have issued many apologies already, but the damage has been done, and this very public problem has assuredly damaged their reputation for providing a bulletproof platform. Businessmen have been without email for most of this week, which is a disaster for the Canadian organisation.