We seem to be experiencing a rather wide spread outage of Blackberry / RIM service in North America. A few Blackberry forums show users reporting significant outages. We also seem to be showing the same issues, as of about 5:15PM Pacific. While we await our official ticket with Blackberry to be acted upon, does anyone have any official word from RIM?
Meanwhile, if this is a large outage, what a great time to go launch an attack. Many, many companies rely on these smartphone devices to alert their operations teams. We are essentially blind. Time to go bust out my alpha pager and fire up qpage. Always good to have a backup plan.
Update:
Received a response from BlackBerry support:
We are experiencing technical difficulties with BlackBerry services affecting sending and receiving of emails. You will also experience issues using the BlackBerry Browser and sending and receiving of PIN to PIN messages. We are taking all necessary actions to restore regular service levels.
Confirmed its a network issue.
Update: 10:00PM Pacific. NBC out of NY has picked up the story.
NEW YORK -- NewsChannel4 has learned of a massive system failure affecting all blackberry users in the western hemisphere.
Its a big one, folks.
Update: 8:50AM Pacific, 4/18/07
As a paid subscriber to Blackberry Technical Support Services, I received an official update from Blackberry. Unfortunately, its contents must be kept confidential. The email begins with a lengthy disclaimer and statement of confidentiality. Obviously, they are trying to communicate, but within some guidelines.
Also changed the subject of this post.
Comments (7)
Fiscal times has been covering this story since 11pm est.
Posted by Harvey | April 17, 2007 10:09 PM
Posted on April 17, 2007 22:09
http://fiscaltimes.com/2007/04/17/massive-blackberry-system-failure/
has been covering this live since 11pm EST.
Posted by Harvey | April 17, 2007 10:09 PM
Posted on April 17, 2007 22:09
How long before we hear that the President's Advisors were unreachable during the outage?
Also, my gut tells me that this was due to a DNS failure- maybe due to recent Microsoft exploits being published?
Posted by BelchSpeak | April 18, 2007 7:26 AM
Posted on April 18, 2007 07:26
Belch -
I have the exact same thoughts. I'm waiting for someone to leak that they got nailed by a MS DNS worm (of which there are now at least 2 versions).
Posted by Andrew Storms | April 18, 2007 7:30 AM
Posted on April 18, 2007 07:30
You know, all of Congress was likely out of contact because of this as well. I wrote my own blog post on this as well based on the frightening idea that emergency responders and most of Homeland Security rely on this service.
Regarding the DNS worm going around, does it cause a denial of service in the DNS services? I don't believe it does. RiM's servers, if vulnerable, should still work if it was just a worm attack. I suspect that there was a targeted incident or intrusion.
Either that, or it was a simple (but massive) database corruption of some sort.
Posted by BelchSpeak | April 18, 2007 7:58 AM
Posted on April 18, 2007 07:58
The DNS worm(s) and attacks are much worse than just a DOS. Many people reporting much worse outcome. For example, this snippet came across my desk _last week_
"TCP port scan from ports 1024-2048. Then a TCP connection to the right TCP port running the vulnerable RPC service. Shellcode binds to TCP port 1100. Attacker uploads a VBscript on this port and then runs it. VBscript downloads an executable DUP.EXE /images/. Executable is self-extracting and contains PWDUMP v5 and an associated DLL."
Re congress and political officials using blackberry's. I've always been highly amazed to see the staffers off in the corners typing away. Then last year a Newsweek article stated that while the President was in Russia, the Secret Service required all staffers to hand over their cellphones and blackberrys. Apparently, the Secret Service was led to believe that the communication over the Blackberry could be intercepted. Ummmmm. Hrmmm. Why don't they take the same precaution here in the states?
Posted by Andrew Storms | April 18, 2007 8:34 AM
Posted on April 18, 2007 08:34
Apparently, the Secret Service was led to believe that the communication over the Blackberry could be intercepted. Ummmmm. Hrmmm. Why don't they take the same precaution here in the states?
I don't think they have any RiM servers over there in Russia. As such, maybe the RiM devices would continuously broadcast their ID's and keys into the empty air?
Posted by BelchSpeak | April 18, 2007 7:24 PM
Posted on April 18, 2007 19:24