BlackBerry Service Restored. Some Still in Shell Shock and Recovering

I love BlackBerry outages. I love “code Black” days, like yesterday, not because I get a break from constant push e-mail to my BlackBerry 8830, but because of stories like Kenny’s, John’s, and Kevin’s. Kenny, told me that he had a hard time focusing on anything yesterday. “I felt as if I didn’t have a complete day; I was BlackBerry-less for 5 hours. I knew mentally there was an outage. However I played with my BlackBerry settings trying to revive it as if I was in a hospital emergency room,” he said. Kenny’s day wasn’t the only one wrecked by the nationwide outage. John Kleinschmidt, who I have spoken to in the past, doesn’t only shower with his BlackBerry at times but he runs www.dataoutages.com. The site monitors the state of the RIM and carriers data servers and informs people immediately if there is an outage. “I am still recovering from yesterday. Oh my god, we were swamped,” Kleinschmidt said this morning. People can subscribe to the data outages e-mail list and the site will immediately send alerts to people to inform them of the outage. “It keeps people up to date and feeling better about the situation,” he added. Kevin Michaluk, the founder of CrackBerry.com, also wanted to make people feel better about the outage situation so he gave everyone a 10 percent discount on all the products (while outage lasts) at shop.crackberry.com. “We wanted to ease the pain and provide a distraction to the fact that people’s BlackBerrys may not have been functioning up to par. For a lot of our readers, when they’re not on their BlackBerry they are on CrackBerry.com. So knowing people were jonesing for their BlackBerrys – the impromptu sale provided a distraction to many – and many took advantage of it!” Not only is service restored today, but so are the lives of “Crackberrys” like Kenny, John, and Kevin. Unlike them, I can’t wait for the next outage! (Full disclosure, I am a BlackBerry addict and member of Crackberry.com).