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Submitted by: Bill Hickey
NCVA List Master

NRT-0152 Blackberry System Update Led to Widespread Outage:

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) said an insufficiently tested software update at the company's network data center was the cause of a service outage that left millions of users without wireless email access. In a statement late on 19APR, the company said the outage from the evening of 17APR into the following morning was triggered by "the introduction of a new, non-critical system routine: designed to optimize the cache, or temporary holding space, of the system that handles email sent to BlackBerry users. Other sources reported the failure of a SRP (Server Routing Protocol) server in RIM's Network Operations Centers (NOCs). While RIM does have two major NOCs supporting North America, the scope of the problem was evidently enough to overwhelm the available redundancy. RIM said it did not expect the update to impact users, "but the pre-testing of the system routine proved to be insufficient."

(apnews.myway.com 20APR07; www.dailytech.com 18APR07)

Last Modified: Sunday, 29-Apr-2007 15:42:52 EDT