The reports have been flowing in since the release of BlackBerry Messenger 5.0 and finally yesterday an "official" announcement that yes, indeed their was an issue with BlackBerry Messenger in general. Many users from the forums feel as though the issue may have been caused by too many users loading Messenger 5.0 and thus causing the BBM servers to be backlogged with the end result being slow, latent message delivery (that was if the messages arrived at all). I myself witnessed BBM's coming in a simply mind blowing six hours later.
I personally cannot say with any certainty that the usage of BBM 5 is what caused the services to essentially be taken off line. But the question itself does raise some finer points about what exactly went on. Bad timing? Possibly -- RIM did have a maintenance window open on the evening of the 18/19th where downtime was expected to be approximately 15 mins. So was the influx of BBM 5 users and this maintenance window the result of the severe latency we all witnessed? Or was there more at hand here?
Later reports suggest that RIM knew their was going to be an issue with the BBM delivery servers and had actually took some of them offline and that was the cause of the problem as it took longer then expected to get them back online and that issue, compounded with the BBM 5 users was what stretched the issue out longer. That's assuming BBM 5 even makes a difference to server workload.
The final theory I have heard so far, revolves around the fact RIM was unprepared for the leak of BBM 5 and at the time had to "flip the switch" on a few of the features within BBM and gave up on fighting the users and actually just allowed everything to function as per normal. The last one is rather outlandish in my opinion. But, we wanna hear what you all think -- was it planned? Was it bad timing for a leak? Did the leak even make a difference or were the issues independent of 5.0? Did RIM just simply screw something up? And last but not least, do you think RIM just gave up on fighting it's users and gave in to the BBM 5 user demands? Let us know in the comments, some forum posts are outlined below.
