I have decided to talk a little about BlackBerry within the news today in regards of the I.T services it provides; mostly communication. The reason for this is because of the well-known involvement of BlackBerry in the news fairly recently and to show that even the most popular and liked brands and businesses go through life with their faults, that are usually much more of a problem to themselves then competitors.
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| Mark Duggan |
The London Riots, which occurred from the 6th-10th of August, swept over several boroughs within London in an act to show the disgust of the shooting of a man named Mark Duggan by the Metropolitan Police on the 4th of August. The rioting carried from London to other areas such as Tottenham and Bristol. As of the 15th of August an estimated 3,100 people had been arrested with a total of 3,443 separate crimes across London; all of which have been linked with the rioting. No politician or police officer could believe the organisation of the rioters and how quickly they were able to attack parts of London so efficiently, in terms of their numbers. As a result of this there is evidence to believe that BlackBerry Messenger had a part to play in the situation.
Rioters would use the system to confer with others and agree to a time and place of looting and destruction; something that they knew would not be compromised by the police since they would be scanning more popular services such as Twitter and Facebook. However, to help in the matter, BlackBerry offered to share their history with the police in the hopes to track down the offenders and bring the disorder to a close.
It is an interesting factor to look into, to say the least, at how BlackBerry was not able to see that some form of irregular activity was going on with their service and whether they had any control to shut it down at all; since they are the ones who programmed the service in the first place. I feel as though BlackBerry could’ve been much quicker to react to the situation and, ultimately, take the system down for a period of time to disorientate the rioters into not being able to group up with each other and strike as effectively as they had done with the easy capability of communication in numbers.
Global BlackBerry Outage:
On October the 10th the members of the BlackBerry family came to a complete stand still as their device was being terribly slow to connect to the internet, or not even at all, and not being able to send emails via BlackBerry Messenger. It started off quite slowly but then quickly reached to a substantial outrage on the social network Twitter. Research in Motion, otherwise more commonly known as RIM, is a Canadian telecommunications company that designs and manufactures wireless solutions for mobile devices worldwide. It provides the technology and platforms for services such as email, voice messaging, instant messaging, internet and several others.
As RIM was the main creator in how the system works for BlackBerry they had a huge fan base come crashing down on them and explanations were demanded to be given to the angry customers. Canada and America experienced the outage first who were then closely followed by the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) the next day. RIM had tweeted out to their customers using Twitter that they were experiencing some technical difficulties but that the system would be up and running shortly; which indeed it was, but only for a day after shutting down again for a continuous 3 day period, giving an overall 4 day period meltdown.
As a way of showing RIM and BlackBerry just what kind of affect this had on the customers, U.S and Canadian customers sued RIM for the problem on behalf of the BlackBerry family. But, as a way of apologising to its customers, RIM’s co-founder Mike Lazaridis has offered its customers a completely free software package that lasts until December, with an estimated worth of $100 (£63) to say sorry. The situation had left BlackBerry members frustrated and irritated and a statistic showed that 1 in 5 BlackBerry users went and converted to an iPhone instead. The whole situation was believed to be down to a small server problem within RIM’s data centre.
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