Although RIM (Research In Motion) has quickly restored its services to millions of users after a 3-hour outage in Africa and Europe, the disruption clearly echoes a bigger failure. These things don’t bode well for the struggling phone makers, especially when the company is working hard with their turnaround plans. It is clear that something hasn’t put right, RIM may have flawed operational structure or even a less than ideal business model. Integrating users into BBM will ensure loyalty, but human error and technical failures can happen eventually despite layered preventative measures.
The outage is a bitterly ironic coincidence as it happens when throngs of iPhone fans are queuing in front of stores. This is certainly a recipe for conspiracy theories, but a full technical analysis is required to identify issues related to quality of service. The outage only affected six percent of RIM’s customer base, but currently the Canadian is always in spotlight whenever it is affected by internal issues.
