Anna Burnside: Communication let me down :-(

BlackBerry has a lot of making up to do after 70 million of their smartphones lost their ‘ping’ in a global crash

SUDDENLY last week, parts of the world went very quiet. Around Tuesday lunchtime, the ping that alerts a BlackBerry user to an email or message simply disappeared. A systems crash at the company’s Slough HQ meant that the network’s email server and internal messaging service, BBM, was giving only patchy, or non-existent, coverage across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina.

Across the world, anxious teenagers fiddled with their trackpads, desperate for an update on whether a person two streets away was watching Glee or The Inbetweeners. Executives gasped for the oxygen of non-stop emails. People were forced to actually talk to each other. Many had forgotten that the device they use for texting, messaging and reading emails, the device that sits beside their bed and wakes them up in the morning, and to which they may even have assigned a name, is also a telephone.

Research in Motion (RIM), the shadowy Canadian company which manufactures the BlackBerry, has reassured its 70 million customers that service is back to normal and that the backlog is being cleared – although it did not rule out the possibility of further disruption to the service in the future. RIM’s joint chief executive, Mike Lazaridis, offered this snappy explanation for the meltdown: “A dual redundant high-capacity course switch designed to protect the infrastructure failed. This caused a cascade failure in our system. There was a back-up switch but the back-up didn’t function as intended and this led to a backlog of data in the system.”

He “personally apologised” to all the BlackBerry customers he had let down, although there was no mention of any folding stuff by way of compensation. Telefonica SA in Spain and Etisalat in the United Arab Emirates have already promised refunds to their BlackBerry customers. Malik Saddi, an analyst with technology consultants Informa, estimates that it could cost RIM $100m to compensate everyone affected for loss of service, not including extras such as the loss of data, or resulting legal cases.

It’s not as if RIM can afford to take the hit. The BlackBerry, once a symbol that the owner was so busy and important that they needed a mini-office in their breast pocket, has been squashed by Apple’s sleeker, groovier iPhone and the whole new generation of cheaper, higher-spec smartphones using Google’s Android platform. In a world where even your granny’s supermarket-bought antique supports email, BlackBerry had two remaining selling points: security and reliability. The former has been tarnished by the widespread use of the untraceable BBM system to foment the summer riots. Now, with almost four days off-line, the latter is called into serious question.

RIM is feeling this where it hurts. Its share price has fallen 80 per cent from its high in June 2008. It is not selling anything like the number of units it anticipated: 10.6 million in June-August this year, well behind its target of 12.5 million. And the timing of the outage (the company’s horrible Orwellian word for the drop in service) could not be worse. The iPhone 4S, with an impressive eight megapixel camera and the option to shout commands rather than type them in, has just been launched. Another smartphone, the Android-based Samsung Galaxy, beat them both in the recent T3 Gadget Awards.

When the BlackBerry first arrived, in 2003, it was terribly exciting. A PDA that was also a phone! On this device, after a bit of fiddling around, possibly with the help of Derek from IT, you could read your work emails! It may have been clunky and black, with a titchy keyboard and an annoying wheel at the side, but it was both a status symbol and a crucial piece of kit. Offices where some people were issued with BlackBerrys while others had to make do with clunking great Nokias were not happy places to be.

Derek and his colleagues, cautious types, liked Blackberry because its servers were secure enough for commercially or politically sensitive messages. BlackBerry is still the device of choice for most US government agencies. Barack Obama famously refused to give his up during the presidential election campaign, despite security concerns, telling CNBC: “They’re going to have to prise it out of my hands.”

Celebrities adopted the BlackBerry because it was expensive and, at first, rare. It added to their self-aggrandising picture of themselves as terribly, terribly important, while giving them something to do while they were at the hairdresser’s. Rappers began name checking it in songs. It became something to be carried ostentatiously, like a bottle of Evian or a Bichon Frise in a Louis Vuitton bag.

Cheryl Cole and her white BlackBerry Torch may still be inseparable, while Kim Kardashian prefers the new Bold 9900, but, in the UK, while one in three adults uses a smartphone, the BlackBerry is no longer the go-to gadget for anyone over 20. What was once nicknamed the Crackberry is now a playground must-have, carried by 37 per cent of teenagers. And 60 per cent of teenage smartphone users describe themselves as addicted. One reason for the drastic drop in the age of BlackBerry users is simple economics. The iPhone is out of the price range of all but the most over-indulged school children and students. The free BBM system, which uses a PIN or barcode to allow users to message other BlackBerry users, is a huge draw for a generation used to instant messaging. For anyone on a budget, the gadget that once allowed the winners of The Apprentice to keep in touch with Lord Sugar is now an affordable communications hub that they can keep in their pocket.

Nina Henderson, 13, reports that the BlackBerry is the gadget of choice among second-year pupils at her Glasgow high school. (Her own mother has refused to buy her one, which she considers a human rights abuse that would offend Amnesty International.) She reels off the name of 10 friends who all BBM each other constantly. “Including in class, with it switched to vibrate. When they should be working.” One had an iPhone, but quickly swapped it for a BlackBerry. Another drama queen was so distraught by last week’s outage that she announced (not seriously): “I’m going to commit suicide.”

Gayle Smith is unemployed and relies on her BlackBerry to keep in touch with friends and colleagues. When you are involved with church, the SNP, several writing and traditional music groups, and don’t have a laptop, this is a serious business. She chose BlackBerry for “financial reasons” and because it looked straightforward.

“I couldn’t return to a basic phone,” she thumb-types on her BlackBerry, via its Facebook app. “I would miss my free Facebook and Twitter too much.”

During last week’s outage, Smith felt “like I was living on a desert island for a few days. I couldn’t even talk to half my Facebook friends. The library only gives you two hours on their computers and my typing isn’t fast enough to say all the things I want to in the limited time I’ve got.”

BlackBerry’s international market penetration is just one reason why Maggie Lennon, director of the Bridges Programme, finds hers indispensable. “My BlackBerry is my office. We’re a small organisation, it’s not as if I’ve got a PA to check my emails. This does mean I work 24 hours a day, because it’s on all the time.”

Bridges, which helps refugees and asylum-seekers find jobs and training in Scotland, works with similar bodies across the EU. As most of Lennon’s colleagues also have BlackBerries, BBM is their virtual water cooler.

When it works, the BlackBerry is a powerful business tool. Two weeks ago, on a work trip to Belgium, Lennon used hers to put the finishing touches to a £1 million transnational bid involving partners in Germany, Poland and the Reunion Islands as well as the UK. Despite being stuck in a wi-fi-free museum in Leuven, she oversaw the transfer and signing of documents from across the world, in several languages, without opening a laptop or leaving an important session. The deal is now in the bag.

Not everyone feels the need to constantly email-text-Tweet-BBM everyone they have ever met. Diana Jones, a sales advisor at Cruise, has a phone so old that it must now be classed as vintage. “No BlackBerry, no smartphone, not addicted,” she says. “It’s the one thing in my life I try to keep simple.”

Others have tried and failed. Former DJ and avid social networker Heather Suttie left her BlackBerry at home in Glasgow when she moved to Tanzania in May. At first she used her locally-bought Nokia as a torch and to summon taxis. But, as she made more friends, it dawned that everyone had a smartphone. (“There are no phone boxes here,” she types on her BlackBerry from Dar es Salaam. “Even Masai warriors carry iPhones.”)

Her roommate passed on an old BlackBerry handset and her old habit was back. “I managed to reconnect with all my BBM pals. I could instantly Tweet amazing pictures from the school where I am doing voluntary work. I could share my trips to Zanzibar, I could BBM my brother and my friends here in Tanzania, Australia, Dubai and at home, all for free.

Then came the crash. “I felt completely cut off and so frustrated when the system went down on day one,” she reports. “I am a single girl in Tanzania, it is not a safe place at times and in certain areas. I need it to BBM taxi drivers, I Google weather patterns and flight schedules. By day three it was driving me mental.

“I have become so dependent on my BlackBerry that a three-day crash has amounted to a major disaster in my life. I would love to go back to my old brick but those innocent days are over.”

Like most members of team BlackBerry, Suttie is in for life. Maggie Lennon feels the same. “I am that single girl in the film Valentine’s Day. The one who says: My most important relationship is with my BlackBerry. Thank god it vibrates.”