The three-day BlackBerry system crash may have every teen in the land screaming “it’s not fair” but it is business customers who have been hit hardest, according to reports.
RIM founder and chief executive Mike Lazaridis has already issued an apology but was unable to say when full service levels will resume.
The outage, which BlackBerry initially said was the result of a problematic network switch and an unsuccessful failover system, was originally seen as affecting consumers and business-people in small companies that link into the BIS consumer data centre.
But many of the UK’s largest firms also use the service, called BlackBerry Enterprise, and customers have confirmed they are experiencing serious problems.
Barry Gill, enterprise consultant at cloud email specialist Mimecast, has been quoted as saying that customers had contacted the company with their Blackberry Enterprise Server problems.
He said: “We have had a number of customers report in to our support desk with BlackBerry issues with email delivery and enquiring about our Mimecast BlackBerry Continuity add-on.”
One IT manager at a large UK firm said: “We are getting emails intermittently, in batches.” Meanwhile another added: “I can’t link in via BlackBerry Enterprise Server. It means I can’t do my job.”
The outage is the latest in a number of problems to beset the BlackBerry brand, with analysts warning customers were likely to consider looking for other devices when their contracts come up for renewal.
At the height of this summer’s riots, the BlackBerry messaging service was blamed for helping would-be looters co-ordinate attacks on retail outlets, leading the press to brand the civil unrest as “the BlackBerry riots”.
