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As the service expands to larger audience, lot of responsibility gets added to the company. We can see similar case with Blackberry, which was previously limited to corporate users, has been opening its base to larger consumers base. With fierce competition from Android and iPhone, the focus towards the larger audience was essential, but it seems Blackberry needs to strengthen its system to cater to the needs.

RIM said BlackBerry users were unable to send or receive e-mails and instant messages but did not lose phone service. Many users also found the Internet inaccessible. RIM said the disruptions began around 1:45 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, worsened around 6:30 p.m. and began to be fixed around 11:30 p.m. Service appeared restored by Wednesday afternoon. RIM would not disclose exactly how many subscribers were affected.

Source : Yahoo News

Recently, after experiencing continuous Outage in Blackberry service, users have expressed their disappointment through blogs and twitter. RIM has issued an apology and admitted the interruption due to the flaw in its recent versions of instant-messaging program. Further, RIM has explained that the glitch in the software created a database error in their server.

So let us get a little more info about the BlackBerry Instant Messaging System. BlackBerry IM allows you to get in touch anyone anywhere who is using BlackBerry through your PinCode. You need to get the BlackBerry Internet plan to enable the service, and this is the area where most people have experienced outage.

Source : Blackberry

The above diagram clearly shows the systems in between you and your friends. The BlackBerry enterprise Server is the heart of BlackBerry services and you can clearly see the dependencies of the system on BlackBerry Configuration Database, Microsoft Office Live Communication Servers and Microsoft Office Communicator Web Access server. As mentioned earlier, the latest BlackBerry Instant Messenger have created unanticipated problems in database (more WSJ).

Security and reliability is the core strength of Blackberry which separates them from other smartphone. But with such failure in the system, users have responded with a threat to change to other systems. Currently, Rim counts  500,000 subscribers in the U.S. government, withPresident Barack Obama. So with such strong user base, RIM needs to focus on its priorities. Instant messaging is the most popular activities in Blackberry and it is known that people continuously use them to get in touch with one another. Thus even a small glitch in the core product can send a seismic wave across the user base.

Image Source : cameraphoneplaza