[JSanders]

I asked a good friend at lunch today if he had noticed his mail down Friday, and he said no, had not. It turns out his corporate mail is BES. He had not noticed his personal aol account was down that day.

[adkalra]

It would be nice if RIM would send out a system wide message if an outage occurs. It is frustrating when you are expecting an important message that is not yet received, with all of these outages I am not sure if the email was never sent or not pushed to my blackberry. If RIM just gave us a notification, then I would know not to expect email on my blackberry and to check my email via PC more frequently.

[madnesss]

It's not really a matter of whether critical messages should be on the non-affected BES, or the fact that it's 'only' been 2 times - I think the thing that bothers people the most is the lack of communication with the affected users...

There's really no excuse - people can understand that issues happen, but there's really no excuse for the communication blackout that RIM adopts when issues do arise. A quick note to all users (RIM would have all the email addresses on the BIS, no?) would have been more than sufficient explaining what had happened. PINs seemed to work during that time, so that would have been a great way to communicate with their users, too.

Our Blackberrys are an excellent tool that we rely (perhaps too heavily) on - but the true test of any tool isn't what happens when it does what it should - it's how well it's supported when it doesn't.

[JSanders]

Originally Posted by adkalra

It would be nice if RIM would send out a system wide message if an outage occurs. It is frustrating when you are expecting an important message that is not yet received, with all of these outages I am not sure if the email was never sent or not pushed to my blackberry.

adkalra, I agree with your premise--but think just a minute about that. If RIM could send out a system-wide message during an outage, there would be little need for the message, right? Like the phone company calling me to tell me my service is down a few hours?

Originally Posted by adkalra

with all of these outages I am not sure if the email was never sent or not pushed to my blackberry.

All what outages? Two? As stated previously in this thread if you read it, RIM has better than a 98.5% BIS uptime this current year. Most of us don't even have that good an attendance record in our employment.

Seriously, I am not trying to pick a fight here, I empathize with you--I was down also.

[aiharkness]

Wirelessly posted (8700g: BlackBerry8700/4.2.1 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/100)

I wonder: I expect the feedback on this forum was better info on what was going than RIM possibly could have provided. Had RIM posted a message on their site, what would it have done for me but tell me what I already knew? Would it give me an ETA of the fix? I doubt it. RIM will tell us they anticipate resumption of normal service soon, or something like that.......... This isn't to say such a web message would not have big PR value. Obviously from posts here, it would.

[test54]

I would compare it to some ISP's they provide network status and it alleviates all the calls, emails and hassle that comes to customer service and other.
RIM needs to give updates, no excuse.

[Lex Luthor]

If there is an issue on RIM's end of things I wish they'd post it on their website right away... usually if I call my carrier and the problem is on RIM's end of things my carrier will blame it on my BlackBerry specifically but after the 2nd or 3rd call (and 30-60 minutes later) they'll be like we just received notice that there is an ongoing issue on RIM's end of things. I'm sure when BlackBerry service goes down it adds a some serious call voume to the carriers call centres. I think RIM should offer a service where you can sign up for text message alerts where if there's an issue you'd receive a text message letting you know. Can someone from RIM see this?!? I hope so!! Nitty's wanted this for a while and I am sure others would like that also!!

[aiharkness]

Wirelessly posted (8700g: BlackBerry8700/4.2.1 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/100)

I guess that's part of the reason I'm not all that mad. I have different expectations. I wish the downtime was 0%, but on the notice issue, I've found those ISP notices pretty useless and don't think RIM would or could do better. And re the carrier, I don't expect the CSR to know all that much if I were to call. If I think there is a problem, here is where I'll look before calling Tmo. While the carrier is figuring out what is going on and passing on instruction to the CSR, bunches of BBF members are discussing it and have pretty much figured out what's going on. Pretty cool in my opinion. But that's just me.

[atuarre]

I really do not understand why people are upset, and raising pitchforks because their e-mail was affected. Things happen, and that is life.

No company can effectively offer 100% reliability on their services because things, sometimes unexpectedly, happen.

My e-mail was not affected. I use BES. Even had my e-mail been impacted by the outage, I still would not have been upset.

Last night, I could not use EDGE. Did I call Cingular and *****, even though I needed some sensitive information at the time, and was on the road. No.

You people really do need to calm down.

[invisik]

Not upset here.. Servers go down from time to time, even the most redundant, fault-tolerance ones. As others have said, some network status page would be nice to just confirm RIM knows there is an outage in progress. Sure no one wants bad press, but as others have said BES servers were not affected and internet access on BIS devices was working. Let's not make it a habit, but you still cannot beat the device functionality and ease of use, so there's little to discuss. I know my customers with Windows Mobile devices have more "down time" in a regular day of putzing with their phone then RIM does in a year.

Keep on keepin' on!

-m

[jonabyte]

Originally Posted by secrecyguy

If I am not mistaken, this only effect AT&T and Sprint and few months ago with T-mobile.

The one in April effected everyone who used a bes on this side of the Atlantic, ans the one last weekend did the same with bis. This was not just one or two carriers.

It would be nice for some communication, not for every blip, but for major outages.

[KeithO]

As I said before, it's only work email so it doesn't really bother me - I have other ways of accessing it if it's critical.

However, I do agree with those who have said that some sort of notification would be useful. I don't know how many of you use Skype (VOIP service) but they have a 'heartbeat' webpage where they list current issues, which is my first point of call if I seem to be having problems with the Skype service at any time.

Heartbeat

I am sure RIM could easily do something like this - it would seem to answer most people's criticisms of RIM not telling them what's going on.

[CanuckBB]

Originally Posted by Nitty

If there is an issue on RIM's end of things I wish they'd post it on their website right away... usually if I call my carrier and the problem is on RIM's end of things my carrier will blame it on my BlackBerry specifically but after the 2nd or 3rd call (and 30-60 minutes later) they'll be like we just received notice that there is an ongoing issue on RIM's end of things. I'm sure when BlackBerry service goes down it adds a some serious call voume to the carriers call centres. I think RIM should offer a service where you can sign up for text message alerts where if there's an issue you'd receive a text message letting you know. Can someone from RIM see this?!? I hope so!! Nitty's wanted this for a while and I am sure others would like that also!!

RIM as a corporation does not deal with individual users. That's the carrier's job. As you say, 30-60 minutes later, the carriers have been notified. When I experience a failure, I'll try to resolve before alerting everybody. If RIM can fix the outage within the first hour, most users will never notice.