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stories filed under: "outage"
(Mis)Uses of Technology

(Mis)Uses of Technology

by Mike Masnick

Tue, Feb 12th 2008 4:54pm


Filed Under:
blackberry, outage, software upgrade

Companies:
rim



Once Again, RIM Blames Upgrade For Outage; Time To Do Weekend Upgrades

from the just-a-suggestion dept

Last year when RIM's Blackberry service had a major outage, the company blamed a software upgrade, which made many folks question why RIM would be doing a major software upgrade in the middle of the week. Since most Blackberry users are corporate users, it would seem to make sense to do upgrades over the weekend -- or at least late at night. So, with this latest outage, it's a bit surprising to see RIM fall back on the old "software upgrade" excuse again. The company doesn't say that's definitely what happened, but suggests that's what caused it, failing to explain why the company would run an upgrade in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday.

15 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
Wireless

Wireless

by Mike Masnick

Mon, Feb 11th 2008 8:59pm


Filed Under:
addiction, blackberry, centralized services, mobile email, outage

Companies:
rim



RIM Toys With Blackberry Addicts Again; Cuts Off Users For 3.5 Hours

from the want-to-stay-connected? dept

Last April, RIM woke many Blackberry users up to the idea that they might be Crackberry addicts by having the system go offline for a few hours overnight. It's amazing how people recognize just how dependent they are on a service once it goes away. The eventual excuse given by RIM (a botched software upgrade) was unconvincing. However, there hadn't been any more outages, so questions about the service died down. However, with widespread Blackberry outages Monday afternoon, lasting about three and a half hours, impacting all mobile operators, some of those questions are going to be raised again. The Blackberry system involves all traffic going through RIM machines, and a cascading problem across those machines can certainly cause quite a bit of trouble. At some point, people are going to start asking if there isn't a more robust, distributed way of offering a Blackberry (or Blackberry-like) service that would be more immune to these types of issues.

29 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
(Mis)Uses of Technology

(Mis)Uses of Technology

by Mike Masnick

Thu, Aug 16th 2007 11:32am


Filed Under:
outage, p2p, skype

Companies:
skype



Skype Outage Highlights How Skype Is A Bit More Centralized Than Expected

from the p2p-or-p2c2p dept

Lots of folks (including many of us here at Techdirt) have discovered that VoIP/IM service Skype is having a pretty massive outage right now, where most, if not all, Skype users simply cannot login. There are plenty of alternatives for people to use, but for those who are used to using Skype (or who use it as a phone replacement, as some do), it's probably a bit of a nuisance. Still, this has to raise some questions. Part of the value of P2P networks was supposed to be their lack of a central point of failure. The idea was you couldn't easily take down (or censor) a P2P network for that reason. With Skype, the fact is that it wasn't completely a P2P app, as the authentication was still centralized. However, this may make some people wonder. After all, there were accusations in the past that Kazaa wasn't really decentralized, and it was Kazaa's founders who built Skype -- and some have said that they simply reused Kazaa's underlying code in building Skype. So, don't be surprised to see some question how decentralized Skype really is after seeing a failure like this one.

18 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
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