Troubleshooting: RIM Outage

Though it doesn’t happen often, there will be times when email on your BlackBerry will come to a screeching halt. If you’re not a huge email user, besides being the only BlackBerry user who isn’t, you might not notice the absence of incoming email right away. However, after several hours…or maybe even a full day of no email, you’ll soon discover that something is definitely wrong. Don’t panic. First, check to see if you can get online via your BlackBerry browser. If you cannot, then there’s a good chance that you’re experiencing the same thing as millions of other BlackBerry users and that is an unavoidable RIM outage.

RIM, the company that makes BlackBerry, offers a very reliable network and highly reliable data devices. Because RIM does such a great job in delivering you the best mobile email solution ever, it is necessary to perform routine maintenance and upgrades to the RIM network in order to make sure that BlackBerry devices everywhere are the greatest little handheld machines that we can’t live without. When these maintenance and upgrade procedures take place, RIM is sometimes forced to interrupt data service for millions of subscribers at a time. As much of a pain as it is, it’s something most of us live with as we understand it to be in our own best interest. If this ever happens to you, be patient as your full data and email service will be restored soon.

Most of the time RIM schedules maintenance and upgrades to be performed at times of low user access like the wee hours of the night. Because of this, we often don’t even realize when we’re in a RIM outage and it has no effect on our day. For others who work and use their devices during non-traditional work hours, it can be a major pain. Also, for many on both sides of the BlackBerry work schedule, it will be necessary to resend BlackBerry service books after the outage to bring email back to full-speed again. If your email has been out for more than a few hours (the norm) then this is probably the case. The outage is over, but your service books are out and are keeping you from receiving incoming mail.

To resend your service books, simply log into your BIS site (see our list of sites published earlier if you don’t know your carrier’s BIS address) and select the service books menu option and click on Send Service Books. If the outage is over, your email box should soon begin to flood with all of the email you’ve been missing before RIM interrupted your flow.

Bottom line is that there’s no need to panic. Just like some websites go down for maintenance, RIM has got to do the same in order to bring you the best quality service around. None of us is wild about an outage event, but since they don’t happen often and don’t last for very long, we’ve come to accept them as a necessary part of BlackBerry life.