For the producers of the device whose name became identical with messaging, it was a severely awkward 36 hours.
Countless numbers of Blackberry clients, initially in Europe afterward in much of the rest of the universe, reveal that their email either sluggish or ground to a stop and the BBM service became engaged.
Poorer, the entire episode turned into a business school case study of how not to converse with your users - Blackberry merely futile to get its message out. When the troubles began to appear around lunchtime on Monday, social networks were rapidly populated with annoyed and puzzled users.
Users who turned to their mobile phone networks for recommendations were all aimed at back to Research in Motion, the Canadian company behind Blackberry. After few hours, RIM utilized one of its Twitter accounts @Blackberryhelp to send out this tweet:
"Some customers in EMEA are undergoing issues. We're prosecuting, and we regret for any inconvenience."
EMEA? Where on earth is that? I think, because marketing speak overflows my inbox every minute, that it stands for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, but several people will cetainly have been confused.
Surely, news reporters were attacking the Blackberry PR team with calls, insisting to know what was continued, how many people were affected, and what was the main reason. By Monday evening, we had nothing in excess of the short line already seen on Twitter.
At a technology awards event in London, newsmen spotted a gaggle of RIM PR people come together around their Blackberries - they assured us further news imminently. And at 21:00 this arrived in our inboxes:
"Previous today, some BlackBerry subscribers in the EMEA area suffered holdups with BlackBerry services. The problem was found out and services are functioning in general. We say regret to those clients who were affected for any inconvenience."
No news then about the size of the problem or what had reason it, but hopes that it was ended now, please move along, nothing to see here.
Then late on Tuesday morning, I began getting messages from Blackberry customers that the problems had come back - emails weren't arriving, and BBM had ground to a stoppage again. Worse, it then appeared that clients in other regions of the world were now experiencing the same problem.
A one-day closed down might just about be excused- particularly when the company says you it has all been found out. But when it come back on a next day, and there's still no excuse you are attempting clients' tolerance with your product to the limit.
At last, at 21:53 on Tuesday evening, this arrived from RIM:
"RIM update: The messaging and browsing stoppages being undergone by BlackBerry customers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina were because of by a core switch breakdown within RIM's network. Though the system is intended to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not meaning as early checked. Consequently, a biggest backlog of data was produced and we are now trying to clear that backlog and bring back the normal service as soon as possible. We express regret for any trouble and we will carry on keeping you informed."
In other words, a pretty grave breakdown had happened in the network on which the entire Blackberry ecosystem depends. This morning, a latest statement informs us that the problem has ultimately been sorted out.
But it took 36 hours for RIM to give the world any clarification of what had occurred - and as much as I feel the company still has not put anyone up for interview. I'm inquiring that some PR officers argued for more openness from the start but were over-ruled by headquarters in Canada.
This planning - say as little as possible, pitilessly control the message from the centre - is alike to the one adopted with such winning by Apple over the years. But when things go bad, it looks like a textbook example of how to lose friends and estrange people.
