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RIM’s Troubles May Not Be Over
October 27, 2011 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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Law firms in the United States and Canada are considering possible consumer lawsuits against Research In Motion Ltd for last week’s BlackBerry outages, which for three days crippled email and messaging for tens of millions of users around the world.
Consumer lawyers say they are investigating whether customers have common claims against the BlackBerry manufacturer and might be able to band together in a single lawsuit.
While the outage did not rise to the level of seriousness comparable to a dangerous medication or tainted food, it inconvenienced and angered customers. Frustrated BlackBerry users, turning to blogs, message boards, Twitter and Facebook, complained about losing important emails and missing meetings last week.
Law firms are considering breach-of-contract or consumer-fraud claims, attorneys said.
A breach-of-contract claim could argue the company failed in its obligations to provide service and could include carriers for BlackBerry service as additional defendants, said attorneys exploring litigation against RIM.
Lightning Took Down Amazon, Microsoft Clouds
August 12, 2011 by admin
Filed under Network Services
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A lightning strike in Dublin on Sunday caused a power outage in data centers belonging to Amazon and Microsoft, causing the companies’ cloud services to go offline.
Lightning hit a transformer, sparking an explosion and fire which caused the power outage at 10:41 AM PDT, according to preliminary information, Amazon wrote on its Service Health Dashboard. Under normal circumstances, backup generators would seamlessly kick in, but the explosion also managed to disable some of those generators.
By 1:56 PM PDT, power to the majority of network devices had been restored, allowing Amazon to focus on bringing EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances and EBS (Elastic Block Storage) volumes back online. But progress was slower than expected, Amazon said a couple of hours later.
“We know many of you are anxiously waiting for your instances and volumes to become available, and we want to give you more detail on why the recovery of the remaining instances and volumes is taking so long,” the company wrote at 11:04 PM PDT. “Due to the scale of the power disruption, a large number of EBS servers lost power and require manual operations before volumes can be restored … While many volumes will be restored over the next several hours, we anticipate that it will take 24-48 hours until the process is completed.”