Portable Planet

Millions of BlackBerry users across the Northern Hemisphere have been affected today by an outage of Research in Motion’s BlackBerry service, and service restoration will take time due to something called ‘load balancing’, says Carmi Levy, senior research analyst with Info-Tech Research Group.

“Once there’s been a service outage of this proportion, RIM’s challenge is to turn service back up to its users incrementally to allow the probably hundreds of millions of clogged emails in their servers to disperse gradually. Otherwise, they would just cause another major service outage,” Levy explained. “It’s called load balancing and is the normal procedure to follow when there’s been a service interruption of this nature.”

The majority of RIM’s eight million customers are located in North America and have been adversely affected by the major service glitch experienced overnight. People in all walks of life - from stock brokers anxious to be up-to-date on pre-market information to media outlets that now have to abandon email communications for more traditional methods, have been impacted. 

“People can barely remember how they coped before the advent of handheld devices,” said Levy. “In terms of financial impact on business beyond the inconvenience factor, there’s no way of quantifying the impact but I think it’s fair to say this is huge. It’s thrown the business community into a tizzy that will have everyone going in circles until service is fully restored.”

Source: Info-Tech