BlackBerry Service Interruption Not Rattling Journalists

It turns out that a software upgrade have crashed RIM’s system leading to a North American-wide interruption in BlackBerry’s email system Tuesday night. New York’s NewsChannel4 calmly broke the news – BlackBerry’s push email service suffered an interruption affecting all BlackBerry users in the entire Western Hemisphere. Though a little later reports began trickling in the European users are unaffected. This is not the first time RIM’s email service has suffered interruption and RIM’s usual jargon-laden crowd control angered the mob even further. They have to stop thinking like engineers and start thinking like a utility, said Richard S. Levick, whose firm Levick Strategic Communications LLC specializes in crisis communications. When the telephone lines go down or the power goes out, the first thing these utilities do is try to fix the problem while simultaneously communicating with the media and customers. Why does RIM think it can’t do two things at once? According to RIM, the outage had nothing to do with security, system capacity and it’s not hardware failure or a core software issue. There was speculation that because of the interruption, RIM’s server would experience an overcapacity, which RIM dismissed.