By Chris Lee

Research in Motion (RIM), the makers of the popular BlackBerry smart phone, was forced to apologise recently after several days of outages, which experts say could impact on sales at a critical period for the smart phone market, especially after the launch of Nokia’s Lumia smart phone. BlackBerry is currently the best selling handset among UK teenagers and has 70 million users worldwide.

Problems started on Monday 10 October, with BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) affected by data outages, a problem which then spread worldwide and lasted until Thursday 13 October.

At the end of the second day of service disruption, Tuesday 11 October, RIM said: “The messaging and browsing delays that some of you are still experiencing were caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure. Although the system is designed to follow a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested. As a result a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused to many of you and we will continue to keep you informed.”

Getting the message

RIM has enjoyed a good reputation for secure and reliable message delivery because, unlike other smart phone providers, it compresses and encrypts data before pushing it to BlackBerry handsets over telephone carrier networks. This security of BlackBerry’s messaging system, BBM, was blamed by some for enabling rioters to organise undetected during the London riots.

To add to its problems, BlackBerry is losing market share. According to analyst group Gartner, BlackBerry sales have dropped by a fifth in the last two years, and with secure and reliable message – BlackBerry’s key unique selling point - in question and sales falling could this latest outage push many users towards other smart phones?

See you later, data

According to Simon Jones, a BlackBerry user and head of PR firm On PR in Germany, the outage is not the key reason many businesses will be re-thinking whether or not to continue as BlackBerry customers.

“It's a big nail in RIM's coffin,” Jones told NMK. “It wasn't so much the catastrophic outage but RIM's arrogant silence.”

In his blog, Jones outlines what he believes BlackBerry should have done to allay customers’ concerns, including: “Provide reassurance. Tell the media you’re taking ‘every possible step’ to reassure customers that this will not happen again – and make sure there’s some substance behind those words. Surely this cloud-enabled world it can’t be that BlackBerry services for the whole of EMEA are all going through one server in the UK? This is not disaster tolerance...”

But other BlackBerry customers remain loyal. Rennie Brown, content strategist and owner of TheCopywritingWebsite.com, relies heavily on email push to her BlackBerry. “It’s been inconvenient, but I wouldn’t jump ship based on the recent outage. I’ve used a Blackberry for over four years and this is the first time there have been problems,” she said.