Blackberry Outage is Very Serious

Blackberry service was restored this morning after about 12 hours of downtime.  Research in Motion, the service provider has not said what the root cause was, nor what the failure was behind the outage.

 

From the AP here:

BlackBerry service was being restored Wednesday morning after an overnight outage that left millions of users without mobile access to their e-mail on the popular device.

Research in Motion Ltd., the Canadian company that provides the devices and e-mail service, said the service interruption began Tuesday night, affecting users in North America.

“Root cause is currently under review, but service for most customers was restored overnight and RIM is closely monitoring systems in order to maintain normal service levels,” the statement from RIM said.

At first, I didn’t think this was such a big deal.  I don’t even use a Blackberry, but I did on my last job where I was de-facto on call 24 hours per day.  But then this blog posting at 360 Security reminded me that most of the emergency responders in the United States rely on this device for communications, especially during a crisis when normal communications are down.

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.

Also out of communication was all of the Presidential Advisors, and probably most of Congress. 

As to the cause, I would suggest that RiM may have had problems with their DNS service.  And with the recent vulnerability and exploit of Microsoft’s DNS service widely available, does this mean that they were hacked?  Or just vulnerable to a worm?