3 Black Days For Blackberry

Greetings Readers.

Today I am looking in detail into what exactly happened with Blackberry.
Like millions of others I have a Blackberry and was in the dark, no red light, no emails, no BBM,
no Internet, no Social  Media.  Nothing.  Just a very expensive timepiece.

So what exactly happened?

Here is what we do know.  Blackberry is made by RIM (Research In Motion) based out of
Canada but now a huge world player.   Under pressure from shareholders for not performing
and not very good results with their new Tablet the Playbook.

This could not have come at a worse time for RIM.

What we do know is the fault apparently happened at one of RIM's communication hubs
in Slough, England.  A core switch failure occurred and the backup failed as well.
As far as we know RIM has multiple communication hubs that we know of one in Canada and
one in England, others in Europe, Asia and the USA.  Beyond that RIM keeps very quiet about if they have any other hubs.

As a result of the failure a huge backlog of data, emails and messages were created and it took a great deal of time to clear that backlog.  RIM managed to fix the problem for a short while then it crashed again and finally it is back up fully restored.

RIM has been signing on a huge amount of new subscribers who love their BBM and BIS services around the world.   RIM did not anticipate that so many people would sign on so quickly.

What can RIM learn from this:

• Avoid keeping your customers in the dark
• Nobody knew what was going on
• There was no real communication between the networks and RIM, so communicate, keep your customers informed.
• Reply to your customers who comment on Social Media platforms, keep them informed.
• RIM Eventually started to put up status updates on the problem on the social media sites other companies can learn from that.
• Plan better, it's a bit like Eskom, they were warned to build more Power Stations, they didn't and South Afrca experienced Power Problems.  
• A good sugggestion for RIM would be to build new communication hubs in each continent to handle the huge load and new clients.

If you are still experiencing problems with your Blackberry do a hard reset, which means 

take your battery out and put it in again and that should rectify any problems.

However one thing  I do appreciate is what the Co-CEO of RIM, Mike Lazaridis did and I leave the last word with him.

Fly high, Fly free

Fred Felton

CEO

Falcon's Cove

A Digital Media Agency

'Social Media Is Our Biz' 

Speaker - Social Media Consulting, Talks & Workshops

email: falconscove@gmail.com

cell: 076-977-5788