Many Blackberry users worldwide were seeking treatment for massive email withdrawal symptoms earlier this week, after RIM’s service was disrupted for hours between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning EST. During the outage, most users lost all email access, while reducing some users email delivery speed to a crawl.

The incident reminded me of a similar situation I encountered in May of 1998. I was scheduled to meet with executives at PageNet, one of the largest pager companies in the US at the time. Arriving at their offices I was greeted by a sizable contingent of television news crews and my meeting was canceled. That morning PageNet had suffered from a massive service outage due to the loss of one of its operator’s communication satellite, affecting almost 40 Million pager users nationwide. In the late nineties, pagers were still the primary wireless medium for businesses, hospital staff and emergency services. The outage was highly publicized and interim workarounds, mainly the use of traditional telephone landlines, were quickly implemented.

Fast forward - Nine years later, cell phones and wireless communication devices have replaced pagers, but the problem remains the same.

The outage highlights how dependent many businesses and government organizations have become on wireless email services. The impact is far greater than observed with the pager outage. The use of wireless email is quickly spreading beyond pure business use with a rapid rise in smart-phone sales since last year. According to Gartner, the sale of smart-phones is expected to double this year to 122 million units sold worldwide.

What is surprising is that we have not learned much from past incidents. RIM’s network is characterized as a first generation system with single points of failure. According to eWEEK.com Senior Writer Wayne Rash, “In the past, government BlackBerry use has been heavily criticized by oversight groups including Congress because it exposes government communications to a single point of failure, as was demonstrated Tuesday night.” Many other communication experts have also warned about the dependence on these services and the exposure to services outages.

RIM has been criticized for its lack of communication with its user community. There is no evidence that the company attempted to notify its users and system administrators. In fact, RIM’s website never acknowledged that there was a problem. As a result, many users contacted their company’s IT department and wireless carriers to troubleshoot the problem.

Most corporate messaging systems rely on extensive failover systems, such as redundant storage, clustered servers and backup networking routes to maintain highest levels of availability. It is time for companies and government organization alike to assess their wireless communication strategy and develop a similar contingency plan that must consist of both technology solutions and documented incident response procedures.

Technorati Tags: Blackberry, RIM, outage, wireless email, PageNet

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