Yesterday started like any other day. I got up early, went out to the Y to workout, then to the grocery store for some food. Just as I was about to checkout I got a call from Joe Solway, a producer at CBC Radio's Metro Morning. He wanted to know if I could go on air in 20 minutes to talk about the outage experienced by Research In Motion that affected all North American Blackberry users. Naturally I obliged, and during the local news segment, Jill Dempsey interviewed me, and to the best of my ability I speculated on what could have happened.

Less than an hour later I got a call from David Friend at Canadian Press. A colleague of his had heard the hit on Metro Morning and felt I'd be a good interview for their story on RiM's outage. We had a great chat, and in the end David used a few quotes from me, including the following:

"This certainly suggests that this was the type of catastrophic failure that exceeded their contingency plans," said Jesse Hirsh, a technology industry watcher for Openflows Networks.

"Certainly customers and shareholders should ask after today whether their contingency plans were sufficient. Guaranteed they had redundant systems that allowed for a minor outage. This suggests something went horribly wrong."

The CP story quickly appeared across Canada via the Toronto Star, Toronto Sun, Calgary Sun, Vancouver Sun, Ottawa Sun, Ottawa Citizen, Winnipeg Free Press, Saskatoon Star Phoenix, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, The Sudbury Star, Halifax Chronicle Herald, Cape Breton Post, CJAD, CJOB, 680News, News1130, 570News, CBC.ca, CTV.ca, Canada.com, and CanadianBusiness.com.

It was then picked up by Associated Press and started appearing in publications and websites around the world including: CBS News, CBS 42, AOL Money, Arizona Central, Brisbane Times Australia, India Times, CIO Today, NewsFactor.com, IEEE Spectrum News and so on...

Before Noon I had appeared on CBC Newsworld, conducted an interview for CBC Radio News, and the CHUM Radio Network.

All of this as a result of Research In Motion having a horrid public relations strategy. All they have to do is engage with the public's interest and desire to know and it would be easy for them to control the spin. Instead the opportunity arises for someone like me to step forward and portray them in a critical light, which I think in this instance is merited. If an outage like this were to have occurred during normal business hours then this would have been an even larger story, and I suspect RiM would have had an equally insufficient public relations response. Far too many tech companies have an arrogant attitude towards media and consumers, and it should not be tolerated. They should be giving us answers in clear English in a timely manner, at the very least in recognition of the dependence many people have upon their products and/or services.

Yesterday evening I was a guest on a panel for TVO's The Agenda, discussing the media, technology, democracy, and lots of other good stuff. It was hard to get a word in with such a large panel, and I was also distracted by Liss Jeffrey constantly muttering and talking under her breath as other panelists spoke. It was fun however, and I got some positive feedback from some friends which always helps.

At the end of the day I was exhausted, and started to reflect on how a few of my words were amplified across great distances yesterday, so much so that I started to get pings back from people who heard or read them. It's definitely a weird sensation, powerful, and yet also humbling.

I've returned to listening to a lot of Bob Dylan lately. The richness and depth of his visions still overwhelm me. They speak so much of the electronic world I and I inhabit, even though I suspect that was not their initial intent. Explicitly his album Bringing It All Back Home continues to move me in profound ways. The visions described are so intricate that each time I hear them they take me somewhere new.

Update: Hello RIM! Minutes after posting this, c243-111.rim.net paid a vist, via a Google Blog Alert and their "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3"

Another Update: CBC has video available of my appearance on Newsworld regarding this story.

Apr 20 Update: Check out this AP article. Looks like my analysis was dead on:

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. said an insufficiently tested software update at the company's network data centre was the cause of a service outage this week that left millions of users without wireless e-mail access.

In a statement late Thursday, the company said the outage from Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning was triggered by “the introduction of a new, non-critical system routine” designed to optimize the cache, or temporary holding space, of the system that handles e-mail sent to BlackBerry users.

RIM said it didn't expect the update to impact users, “but the pre-testing of the system routine proved to be insufficient.”

The Waterloo, Ont.-based company also said the process designed to maintain service in the event of a failure “did not fully perform to RIM's expectations,” causing a longer delay before service was restored.

RIM said it ruled out security and capacity issues, along with hardware failure or core software issues, as the cause of the disruption and is improving its testing, monitoring and recovery processes to prevent such an outage from happening again.