RIM Says BlackBerry Messenger Error Resolved

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As we mentioned earlier, RIM acknowledges a wave of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) errors in Asia Pacific. Twitter in Indonesia is swarming with negative sentiments towards RIM and BlackBerry. There’s even a Twitter “rap” mocking BlackBerry users for today’s error.

The errors, however, started to die down later in the day. PR manager of RIM Indonesia Yolanda Nainggolan said to Detik.com (translation is ours):

We have finished fixing the service interruptions experienced by our users in the APAC (Asia Pacific) when sending and receiving BBMs, and full services are recovering right now. We apologize to users for any inconvenience.

According to the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology in Indonesia, BlackBerry services have faced three outages this year. There was even a conspiracy theory about RIM’s outage before, as previously mentioned on Kompas.com. In March 2012, the House of Representatives held a plenary session about the plan to increase the fuel prices, which sparked protests. At that time, BlackBerry’s email service was disrupted. The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology spokesman, Gatot S. Dewa Broto, said there was speculation that the Ministry had created a conspiracy to disrupt the spread of information (translation is ours):

Back then, there were people who accused the Ministry of being behind such scenarios. We were accused of going to impede the flow of information to the outside by turning off the BlackBerry email service. Fact: the problem came from RIM technical problems.

Today, the same day as the BBM error reached its peak, Indonesian laborers held a mass strike and demonstration against outsourcing. Gatot doesn’t want people to speculate again that the ministry is behind both of the issues.

Telecommunication analyst Sutikno Teguh mentioned to Merdeka.com that Indonesian carriers have to use this moment to insist on building a RIM server network in the country in 2012. He argued that it will be easier for the government and the operators to do forensic audits as interference occurs.

After the BBM service slowly recovered, a hoax message was spread in BBM Broadcast Message (BM) which said that BBM users who don’t spread the message will be deactivated. Yolanda denied responsibility for this on Detik.com, stating that this BM was not officially spread by RIM.

Indonesia now has 3.5 million BlackBerry users who have suffered service interruptions because of these issues. Perhaps RIM could consider some form of compensation to keep its many users loyal. BlackBerry is the most popular smartphone in Indonesia, but issues like this can only help in pushing users towards the already-growing Android platform instead. They could also make users want to switch to other chat apps such as Whatsapp and WeChat.

Source: Kompas.com, Detik.com, Merdeka.com, Okezone.com

This article was updated at 0:48 to correct several issues with the language and to clarify that the translated quotations are our own translations.