Blackberry Outage Raises Questions About Our Tech Dependence in 2011
October 2011 - originally published on PolicyMic
After three days of interrupted service, empty inboxes, and no internet connectivity, millions of Blackberry users’ service is finally being restored. Blackberry’s problems spanned the globe, with users from the Middle East to Canada left offline.
With Twitter exploding over the past few days with irate users struggling to find answers and urging Blackberry to restore service quickly, the widespread disruption makes one thing clear: We must think about the impact our dependence, as a society, on a single device such as the Blackberry.
The service disruption made work slower for those who rely on Blackberry e-mails; for example,congressional staffers struggled during the 12-hour debate on the Senate floor about free trade agreements to coordinate between aides on the floor and in Senate offices. While the outage did not stop government business, it did slow it down and highlight dependence on mobile e-mail.
One wonders, even, if our commander-in-chief, famous for his Blackberry addiction, was left helpless and disconnected.
Similarly, business on Wall Street slowed as bankers were hindered without mobile access. Many banks, like Barclay’s Capital, for example, issue only Blackberry’s to their employees – making the disruption’s impact inevitably disastrous.
Blackberry’s stock has been plummeting – the recent outage will do little to help it.
Twitter and Facebook feeds over the past few days have been cluttered with grief, outrage, and humor, all about the outage.
It is evident, especially over the past few months, that technology has an incredible power to empower people, with social media and blackberry messaging enabling protests and riots alike.
However, our dependence, as a society, on a single device, is frightening. The fact that our financial institutions’ and government’s functioning effectively could be hindered by lack of internet on mobile phones highlights not only our reliance, but also the incredible power that these companies hold.
If Blackberry service completely shut down, would Wall Street and the hill, too, slow to a complete halt?
Perhaps the answer is simply to diversify our mobile phone options. Or maybe we need to hold Blackberry, as a company providing society a necessity, more accountable. Whatever move we take, we, as a society, need to realize that smart phone outages will keep coming; it is up to us to decide how best we prepare to deal with them.
