Recently, RIM’s BlackBerry subscribers in North America and parts of Europe and Asia, were unable to access their e-mails, as a result of the widespread system failure. Services were completely outaged and BlackBerry subscribers could neither receive nor send e-mails. Nevertheless, phone services remained unaffected and subscribers could make regular phone calls as well as send and receive SMS text messages.

Although RIM has still not provided an answer, as to what caused this outage, analysts have an answer to this.

Analysts believe that technical issue within one of RIM’s Network Operation Centres (NOC), which acts as an intermediary between corporate mail servers and recipients, could have caused the outage.

The BlackBerry Enterprise Server on the corporate network receives e-mails from the company's Exchange or Lotus e-mail server and forwards those e-mails in an encrypted tunnel to one of the NOCs. After authenticating the user, the NOC forwards the messages to the correct handheld device.

However, with just two NOCs managing e-mails form 8 million subscribers, there are two points of potential failure. Hence, if something goes haywire in one or both the NOCs, it could result in an outage.

Analysts also believe that as the company continues to add on to its subscriber base, its networks have become increasingly vulnerable. As Dan Taylor, managing director, Mobile Enterprise Alliance, points out, "With all the recent subscriber growth the company has seen, it's not surprising that they would have network problems."

An outage could also result from power failures, failure of a critical component, software bugs, viruses or patches that fail. Principal analyst at Gartner, Todd Kort believes that a software bug might have caused the outage.
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Kort, however, was quick to add, "RIM will quickly fix the infrastructure problems resulting from the company’s quick growth."