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In the mid-1980s, I was witness to an incident where an upgrade to the SS7 software used in AT&T's long distance network took most of North America's long distance service down hard for more than twenty-four hours. It was then that I began formulating what came to be called Pinkston's Law: MOST OUTAGES BEGIN AS UPGRADES

Over the years since, I have seen this happen so often that whenever I hear of a major telecom or data service outage, my first thought is, "Must have been an upgrade. Pinkston's Law." In the vast majority of cases it turns out that that's exactly what it was! So, at the urging of those closest to me, I've started this blog to chronicle the occurrences of Pinkston's law whenever I hear of them.

Friday, December 25, 2009

Blackberry E-mail Outage: 02/11/2008


  • Length of outage: 3 hours

  • Number of people affected: Unknown, North American users of Blackberry's email
Original Story: http://www.cnbc.com/id/23134603
This outage should probably count as at least two examples of Pinkston's Law, based on this quote:
It was the second major outage for the service in less than a year. In April, a minor software upgrade crashed the system for all users. A smaller disruption in September also was caused by a software glitch.
I find it interesting that at least one analyst zeroed in on the existence of a Network Operations Center (NOC) as a contributing factor in the outage:
Any time you got a system that's got a NOC, a Network Operations Center, you have the potential for a single point of failure. What's a bit surprising to me is that with all the work they've been doing over time ... that they haven't been able to have enough redundancy in the NOC so that there isn't a single point of failure.
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