All those Android and iOS users who were extremely excited about the BlackBerry Messenger application must have been shocked to hear that the roll out had been stopped at the eleventh hour. And now we hear that the launch has been pushed back and there’s no confirmation regarding the new release date of BBM.
According to a post on the official BlackBerry blog, hours before the Android application was to go live, an unreleased version showed up on the internet. And within 8 hours, there were as many as 1.1 million active BBM users. This may have led to heavy traffic in the servers and eventually some issues cropped up. And of course, the company was unable to address them in the short span of time that they had.
Andrew Bocking, EVP, BBM shed some more light on the reason why the release was discontinued. The version that had leaked was actually an older, unreleased one and wasn’t updated and thus, ‘impacted the system in abnormal ways.’ And the huge number of downloads of the file only made it worse. And as the company representative says, halting the roll out was the only option left.
As of now, the company is concentrating all of its attention on blocking the leaked application completely and finding ways to tackle with the problem if it happens again. It should be noted that the entire fiasco had no effects on the BlackBerry’s version of the messenger and it continues to function perfectly.
We have no idea when the BBM for Android and iOS application will be released, but whenever it is confirmed we’ll definitely let you know.