What happened to everyone's BlackBerry?

Oct 12, 2011

BlackBerry users have been frustrated by problems with email for the last few days - but why does the problem affect one kind of phone on every network?

BlackBerries access email and other services differently to other smartphones. Instead of communicating directly with the email provider, they connect to a special BlackBerry server. This server checks the email account and automatically “pushes” any new messages to the phone.

Businesses usually own and run their own server, known as a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, or BES. But for individual users, BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion (RIM) provides the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS), a publically available version.

It was a problem with BIS that stopped BlackBerry users accessing email and other services. Because the phones connect to the same service whatever network they were on, the problem affected every network and spread across the whole of Europe, along with Africa and the Middle East.

Your shout!

Have you been affected by the BlackBerry outage? Share your thoughts by posting a comment using the link below.

what happened to their redundancy, is their IT dep up to scratch, and how many people and business do you think are now going to change from BB to something else? Bec that's 3 days of loss of business, and what is the PR dep going to do now to keep all their affected customers happy and to keep them with BB, all IT guys know how important redundancy is, 1 server, that's a joke, I saw a few weeks ago that in the UK some hackers warned BB that they will be hacked if BB helps the government with some riots it had, and RIM said they would if they followed the correct protocols, so those hackers used BBs and UK wasn't affected with this, makes you think hey

Andrew 13-10-11