With BlackBerry users still fuming over the near-total collapse of e-mail just prior to Christmas, the impact on manufacturer Research In Motion could last a lot longer than a New Year's Day hangover. Users got an early piece of coal in their stockings Tuesday when many BlackBerry smartphones -- now deemed "Crashberries" by some wags -- stopped sending and receiving e-mails.
BoxTone, a mobility  management software provider, said the outage started between 3 and 4 p.m. Tuesday and reached a critical state by 7 p.m. "At each of our customers, BoxTone detected a greater-than-normal quantity of users with messages pending, based on our learned baseline of what is normal for each server and carrier, and immediately generated a warning alert to our customers before the flood of user calls," the company said.
On Wednesday, RIM released a status update, explaining the outage and apologizing to users. The problem appeared to be a software glitch in new versions of BlackBerry Messenger. Users are advised to download the latest version, 5.0.0.57, which solves those problems.
Service Interruptus
"A service interruption occurred Tuesday that affected BlackBerry customers in the Americas," RIM's statement said. "Message delivery was delayed or intermittent during the service interruption. Phone service and SMS services on BlackBerry smartphones were unaffected. Root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure ."
BlackBerry users weren't mollified by the announcement, judging from angry comments on the popular Crackberry blog. In a post entitled "WOW ... just WOW," one user wrote, "BBM causes a system-wide crash?!?! Glad RIM isn't responsible for y'know, security or Wall Street or something."
Indeed, a major outage on the eve of Christmas Eve is an especially propitious event for would-be cyberattackers, Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle, said in an e-mail. "Knowing that an incident-response team's ears or eyes are diminished due to a service outage would be even more appealing" to hackers, Storms said.
"This was not the first widespread outage experienced by BlackBerry users this year and there has been at least one other in recent years. Those companies with good incident-response plans, which are reliant upon the BlackBerry system for critical communications, are certainly thinking about a backup plan," Storms said. (continued...)
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