It may just be a coincidence, but last Friday afternoon, there was a story at iPolitics.ca that reported a "mysterious outage" that took down "e-mail, blackberry service (sic) and the Parliamentary web site."
The story said that:
"Officials in the Speakers office said they were 'not at liberty to disclose' what caused the problem."
As far as I can tell, there hasn't been any official statement about the cause of the Canadian outage, nor any other press coverage of it.
Also on Friday afternoon, a story appearing at Foreign Policy reported that there was "a massive e-mail and Blackberry outage" at the US Department of State.
According to the story, a State Department spokesperson told the FP that "there was no apparent rhyme or reason as to why State Department employees were having technological issues."
Again, there doesn't seem to be any follow-up reporting on the State Department outage. And as far as I can tell, there were no other reported Blackberry outages on Friday.
If anyone has any more information on either of these outages, or whether they were connected in any way, please let us know.
Robert N. Charette is a Contributing Editor to IEEE Spectrum and an acknowledged international authority on information technology and systems risk management. A self-described “risk ecologist,” he is interested in the intersections of business, political, technological, and societal risks. Charette is an award-winning author of multiple books and numerous articles on the subjects of risk management, project and program management, innovation, and entrepreneurship. A Life Senior Member of the IEEE, Charette was a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core Award in 2008.
