A few days ago I brought you an incredible tale about how the mighty and glorious Research In Motion (RIM) was going to cripple the world with their scheduled outage for all BlackBerry users.  As it turns out they decided to postpone the outage.  Their reasoning?  Flooding.  What does flooding have to do with the outage?  I asked the same question.  The answer is more specifically flooding in Missouri.  You see RIM, being the noble and upstanding corporate citizen, decided to postpone the outage is a show of "outstanding cooperation" with Missouri's emergency response community.  It would seem that they didn't want to look like the bad guy in the middle of a crisis.  Rightly so, that might have hurt sales.

As I understand it, the Department of Homeland Security, in the United States of America, requested the postponement late on Friday afternoon.  Seems that the allegedly anti-terrorism unit of that country have a bit of clout in such matters.  I wonder how much convincing it took?  In the past, RIM has never shown any glimmer of understanding to community impacts during such outages.  Have they turned over a new leaf?

I guess this means that the new date, yet to be released, is still something we can all look forward to.  My BlackBerry is paid for by my employer, so they should have more to say about the issue than I do, however I feel quite perturbed by any outage to a service that I rely on.  Whether it's cable, Internet, wireless, telephone, or any other service I generally expect that they have the proper contingencies and redundancy in place so that I never have to experience a loss of service.  I don't really feel that this is too much to ask for, especially after I review the monthly costs associated with said services.  I'll be sure to post the new date for the outage when it becomes available to me.