Another BlackBerry Service Outage? Wokka Wokka!

Reports are sporadic at the moment, but it looks as though CrackBerry addicts could be in the midst of their third major service outage in a year. Remember when Palm got their swagger back by Knocking the NOC? That's “Network Operations Center,” the centralized server through which all BlackBerry emails must go. Up until recently, it had been the paragon of reliability and stability, but in the past year some “upgrades” have managed to knock the NOC down for hours at a time.

That's what BlackBerry users across many carriers are reporting this morning... BES users seems to be ok, and not everyone seems to be affected, but the word so far is that there are BIS difficulties today. - ALERT: Nation Wide BlackBerry Internet Service Issues?! | CrackBerry.com

Update: Looks to be “limited” to Verizon, AT&T and maybe T-Mo. Definitely limited to certain areas of the country. Service coming back already for some folks, though there are still delays. In other words, this might not strictly be RIM's fault, but instead the fault of the carriers. Keep an eye on our sister site, CrackBerry.com, for updates.

I learned from the CrackBerry.com Podcast that a relatively short outage of the NOC can actually cascade into a longer outage as RIM's servers try to catch up on all the email that didn't get sent out.

Speaking of Podcasts, our podcast has been sketchy lately: we missed last week because of CTIA. This week's is all recorded up (with a special guest appearance by CrackBerry Kevin) and needs to be edited in two parts - the standard part and a bonus section where Kevin, Mal and I actually discuss the ups and downs of using a NOC to push email out instead of the Microsoft Direct-from-your-own-server method. Topical, no? Expect both parts tomorrow!