As of April 18 (Or April 19 where I live in Singapore), BlackBerry users in the u.S. can breath a sigh of relief as their devices start beeping and vibrating again. To learn more about how such a massive failure is even possible, check out my earlier article BlackBerry Suffers Massive Outage where I explain it in more depth.

Most people are not aware, but the BlackBerry technology operate on a store-and-forward mechanism through the NOC, to which the BES also connects to directly. There are advantages to this as, such as not needing to setup any custom firewall rules to cater to the BlackBerry. Also, because all packets are strongly encrypted, security generally is not a problem.

However, precisely because all traffic packets is encrypted, RIM is unable to distinguish between the traffic and hence cannot just “discard” ANY packets at all without the potential of “losing” your e-mails. Which is the situation at the moment: RIM has been quoted as saying that the problem with the delivery system has been fixed, but that the company is releasing e-mail slowly so as not to overwhelm its system. [eWeek: BlackBerry Devices up And Running Again]

As usual, there are those who caution not to overblow the service disruption. I agree in principle - afterall, there is no real need to make a hyperbole out of everything.

Jack Gold, principal analyst for J. Gold Associates in Northborough, Mass. was quoted in the above eWeek article that “Microsoft is also susceptible to server failures and I suspect that it has a high rate of failure compared to BlackBerry”. It seems a pretty standard thinking among BlackBerry supporters. However, this completely fails to put into consideration the fact that an enterprise push mail system normally sees an Exchange server in the back end connected to a BES, which in turn is connected to a RIM NOC.

In such an instance, a BlackBerry setup can only ever be as “reliable” as an Exchange Server at the very best. But as we saw just a few days ago, “best” just does not exist anymore.

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