UPDATED: RIM's (RIMM) BlackBerry System Dies, Millions Without Email
Research In Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry mobile email system is down nationwide, according to our Sprint rep and confirmed by Boy Genius Report, which says the outage started around 10 a.m. for some T-Mobile and AT&T subscribers.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is RIM's second national BlackBerry blackout of 2007: an outage in April knocked out service before the company disclosed what caused the failure. The recurrence matters because BlackBerry's core pitch to corporate buyers has always been reliability — a hosted, centrally managed email network that devices depend on.
Today's outage, flagged via Sprint and confirmed by The Boy Genius Report, spans all three major US BlackBerry carriers at once, which points at RIM's infrastructure rather than any one operator's network. It lands amid unconfirmed reports from August that AT&T was restricting features on the BlackBerry 8820 in favor of the iPhone, putting carrier loyalty to the platform under scrutiny.
First-order effects
- Millions of Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T subscribers lose mobile email mid-workday, with no workaround since delivery runs through RIM's network rather than the handsets.
- The three carriers absorb customer-facing blame for a failure inside RIM's own system, fielding complaints for an outage their networks did not cause.
Second-order effects
- Carriers marketing BlackBerry plans on uptime now face pressure to extract service-level guarantees from RIM or diversify their business-device lineups — a tension sharpest at AT&T, which is simultaneously launching Apple's iPhone.
- Corporate IT departments that standardized on BlackBerry for dependable push email get a live argument for redundancy clauses and multi-platform pilots in their next mobility contracts.
Third-order effects
- If nationwide outages keep repeating, RIM's centralized hosted-email architecture — historically its differentiator against consumer smartphones — risks being reframed as a single point of failure, weakening the moat behind its enterprise lock-in.
The trend: Recurring central-network failures are turning BlackBerry's hosted architecture from a reliability selling point into a structural vulnerability in enterprise mobile email.