Many people who’ve been using BlackBerry services in India as well as abroad have probably been facing an outage today. This is something the company acknowledged through a Twitter post just about 7 hours ago without actually revealing the full scale of the disruption.
The issue has cropped up in the face of the Canadian company’s renewed efforts on brand building in a market that is wholeheartedly giving in to the charms of giants like Samsung and Apple. It is the first time the service has been down since the launch of the all new BB10 OS. Back in October 2011, millions of users in the Middle East, Europe, North America and Africa were put through the inconvenience of almost 3 days of disrupted facilities owing to a back-up switch glitch.
Although it is remembered for being one of the worst outages in the company’s history, there was a similar 14-hour problem in April 2007 too. Today’s hitch appears to be resolved to a major extent considering the BB Twitter account tied to customer care has already tweeted a line indicating that all services are crawling back to normal. But we’re yet to hear about the excuses behind the bother since ‘We are investigating and apologize for any inconvenience’ is all that’s been volunteered so far.
When it comes to a brand like BlackBerry which is trying hard to get back in the arena, it’s hard to shrug it off with a ‘no publicity is bad publicity.’ We mean, it’s not the same with Samsung and Apple who are probably enjoying the extra attention the ‘Switch to the Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phone’ commercial has been giving them of late. Haven’t seen the video yet? We know it’s a little off topic, but we’ve posted it below for those who missed it.
Moving back to the subject of BlackBerry, the company has been pushing for attention on the entire brand reinvention thing it had going with the Z10 and Q10 launches. Yesterday, it was seen trying to make a mark among customers with a reasonably low Rs. 129 BB services pack for certain parts in India. How is this latest headline about the service outage going to affect its reputation? We’re watching.