What's your take on the BlackBerry 'Outage-Outrage'

Many of us Indian mobile phones users, be it from the business class sector or the average college student have grown to live by BlackBerry’s promise at delivering un-hindered mobile services. BBM and email support, never mind web, are a big deal for almost every single BlackBerry handset user in the country. In the last couple of days however, the BlackBerry using community has been hit hard with to a stroke of ‘anti-connectivity’. Due to an issue with BIS (Blackberry Internet Service) and BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server), services have been down, then up and are back to being down again with no official word of reprieve being spoken so far.

See-Saw connectivity

The “Core Switch” failure that was reported may very well be the reason behind the loss of services. The fact remains though, RIM’s niche customer base who rely heavily on their services in some cases, were in possible dire straits on the business front for the last couple of days. In Colombia, South America, RIM has been asked by local telcom providers to compensate customers for lost services as a result of the outage. Reports also quoted David Yach, RIM's chief technology officer for software as saying - "Our priority is to get the service up and running, because at the end of the day what's going to make our customers happy is to have their BlackBerrys working again,"  Shares of RIM were down 3.9 percent in Toronto trade after the late-afternoon call, which RIM held days after the disruptions began in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India.

RIM seems to have rectified the issue as systems seem to be all in the green but the last few days were not so good for the “BlackBerry Boys”.

What we’d like to know is what’s your take on all this dear readers –

What was it that affected you the most about this “outage-outrage”?

Are your services are up and running yet?

If you’ve spoken to your operators, which I’m sure most of you have, what is the explanation you’ve been provided?

This is the place to voice your concerns and get a dialogue going. Feel free to share.