The numerous issues and problems with Blackberry / RIM in 2009 continues in 2010 with several data outages spiking negativity towards the brand in Social Media. Users in social media, in particular business users, are furious about these problems and several users are expressing their desire to leave their Blackberries behind in favour of the iPhone or Android based devices.

The latest incident happened on March 7th, when Blackberry users started to report data issues with their handsets: BIS (Blackberry Internet Service) was down. However data transfer over Wi-Fi worked fine in most cases.  The first complaints on the issue came mostly from users of the BB Bold 9700, which was the reason why, in the beginning, people thought it could be a problem with that handset only. Some users tried removing and re-inserting the battery, but obviously it didn’t help.  Hours later, users of other models of BB claimed they also had the same connectivity problems.

The idea that this could also be an operator issue was soon ruled out, as people from Canada, the UK and a few from Latin America claimed to have the same issues with their Blackberry handsets. It wasn’t until then that people realized the connection problems were due to an outage. T-Mobile finally confirmed it was a RIM issue.

Not responding to their customers may very well be the biggest mistake that RIM / Blackberry made. Users expect their brands to listen, not ignore them.

Two days later (March 9th) the problem was still unsolved. RIM did not pronounce themselves on the issue, which only led to harsher comments about BB/RIM on forums, blogs and twitter. This silence has not done any good to BlackBerry’s reputation.  A large number of users are expressing their dissatisfaction and clearly state that they are fed up with the situation, since this is the second BB outage since the beginning of the year (with 2 major and several minor ones in 2009 as well). These customers say they’ve had enough and are considering leaving Blackberry.

On March 10th, T-Mobile in the US informed the outage finally had been fixed. However, they state it was due to a problem with Wi-Fi only, which contradicts what had been reported by many affected users on the different Social Media channels.

Despite the problem has apparently been fixed, there are some users who report they still have data issues. Either they have no connection at all, or it’s unstable.  The growing attention to RIM related outages in social media clearly indicates raised awareness and negative sentiment associated with RIM. A segment traditionally influenced by enterprise users is now seing a shift towards more regular consumers owning BB handsets, which may also explain a generally larger social media engagement towards the brand.

Similar comments were made during the outages in 2007 and after the outages in December 2009. Users expect RIM to inform them about what is happening and not avoid answering their questions and keep them in the dark.  BB customers are clearly stating that if these outages continues, they will abandon the brand for other handsets like the iPhone or Android based devices.

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