RIM Releases Reason for Blackberry Outage

An anonymous reader writes "According to BBC News, RIM has announced that the cause of this week's network failure for the Blackberry wireless e-mail device was an insufficiently tested software upgrade. Blackberry said in a statement that the failure was trigged by 'the introduction of a new, non-critical system routine' designed to increase the system's e-mail holding space. The network disruption comes as RIM faces a formal probe by the US financial watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission, over its stock options."

What really happened...

[Mockylock]

This is all just technical jargon for, "I tripped over the power cord. MY BAD."

Non-critical?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is obviously some new definition of the word "non-critical" with which I was previously unfamiliar.

bkd

Buying time

[faloi]

The irony is that the SEC couldn't do any more investigating during the outage because they had no email access!

Ah ha!

[Grashnak]

So that is where the missing 5 million White House emails went! Sneaky Canadians!

A QA manager has any say on how much testing?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think not. You realize this is 2007, yes? Ask the marketing department for how much testing they get.

Re:I'd hate to be their QA manager right now!

[david_g17]

Madness?!?!, No, this is SLASHDOTTTTTT!!!

~kicks guy into a bottomless pit~

the REAL reason....

[markana]

>...the failure was trigged by 'the introduction of a new, non-critical system routine' designed to increase the system's e-mail holding space.
    :
>The network disruption comes as RIM faces a formal probe by the US financial watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission, over its stock options.

Hmmm... so when they wiped the incriminating e-mails from the system (which would certainly create more space), they took the rest of the system down (which prevented anyone else from grabbing copies).

I'm reading WAY too many conspiracy novels these days :-)

(Not that I think this actually happened - but it makes for a great plotline).

PR to IT translation results

[192939495969798999]

"insufficiently tested software upgrade" => "untested software upgrade" => "some superstar at RIM changed the CRASH_NETWORK constant from 0 to 1."

Re:Is this really so bad?

[NoseyNick]

"BlackBerry goes down, it's headline news. Exchange goes down, it but be Friday"

Re:RIM's biggest failure

[nettdata]

Yeah... they should have just sent out an email to all the BlackBerries saying email would be disrupted for a while....

Re:I'd hate to be their QA manager right now!

[scottv67]

I complained to the VP of Engineering that our tests were blocked because I couldn't get the video bridge to come up on our lab network.

Did you try setting CardboardEthernet0/0 to "100/full" instead of "auto/auto"? :^)

Re:I'd hate to be their QA manager right now!

[Anonymous Coward]

How many people here have checked in buggy code that neither management nor QA knew was buggy?

Well, I know I and my co-workers have. But then again I work for Microsoft.