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.
