New BlackBerry Crash Brings Second Day of Woes to Euro Users

By Geoff Spick (@Goffee71) Oct 11, 2011

New BlackBerry Crash Brings Second Day of Woes to Euro Users RIM's woes continue in Europe with users reporting a second outage in two days as the company struggles to recover from yesterday's major disruption and BlackBerry users flood Twitter with complaints, again.

Dark Days for BlackBerry Users

Monday, starting from late-U.K. morning, BlackBerry's consumer-facing servers (housed in Slough, England) fell offline for a total of around 20 hours, leaving many BB mobile users to do their socializing on other forums and taking to complaining on Twitter. The outage affected not only the U.K., but mainland Europe, and the Middle East and Africa with BlackBerry Messenger, Email and Web access affected.

But shortly after RIM posted an all-clear message earlier Tuesday, those systems are going down again with frustrated users venting their anger online, presumably from their back-up devices or PCs — neatly summarized by one tweet, 'BLACKBERRY ARE YOU SERIOUS?! MY BB IS DOWN AGAIN!?'

The BlackBerryHelp Twitter account just posted on the latest issue: "Some areas have messaging delays and impaired browsing. We’re working to restore normal service as quickly as possible."

UPDATE: This outage is now into its third day with #BlackBerry now reduced to being just a fruit again, according to frustrated Twitter users and the BlackBerry Help account only offering, 'Message delays were caused by a core switch failure in RIM's infrastructure. Now being resolved.' As a token message, now over 12 hours old with no sign of a time to finish repairs.

Is All Publicity Really Good?

On the positive side, it seems the issue is not affecting BlackBerry enterprise servers that run its major business clients' systems. If those were being affected, disgruntled corporates would probably be looking to take their business elsewhere as exective schedules across continents were thrown into chaos.

For consumers though, with a wide range of devices to choose from, they may well be thinking about the end of their contracts and looking at the new iPhone 4S or the Android Nexus Prime. While RIM does have new phones and a new OS to tempt users, long outages will do nothing to win user favor.

Expect the post-mortem of these incidents to be widely discussed among telcos (who are all blaming RIM for the problem) and service providers (who don't want it to happen to them). And expect RIM to be hoping the outage isn't repeated or spreads wider across its systems.