Slow Email? BlackBerry Outage

Research In Motion Ltd. says an outage left users in North America without access to their BlackBerry email service on Monday, beginning about 3:30 p.m. Eastern Standard time and lasting about three hours.

RIM says no messages were lost during the incident, which caused intermittent delivery delays. No explanation for the outage has been given.

Outages of this sort are the reason many of us are giving more thought to backup and redundancy strategies. On a recent business trip, for the first time in my life, I accidentally left my laptop at home, and was going to be gone for 14 days. True, I had the BlackBerry and another mobile as well.

But in my line of work access to the Web is arguably more important than either of those two sorts of devices, as important as they are. Because of Google Documents & Spreadsheets and Google Broswer Sync, I was able to keep working using public terminals and loaned machines, with access to Microsoft Office.

I also learned to live without access to Outlook for a bit. The BlackBerry helped, of course. The lasting change so far is that I have kept using Google Documents more than I have in the past. That's why sampling is so important. Behavior can change.