Case Study: RIM’s poor Social Media response to Blackberry outages of October 2011

Jackie Titolo, Pei Wang

Research In Motion (RIM), a global leader in wireless innovation, revolutionized the

mobile industry with the introduction of the BlackBerry® solution in 1999. It powers millions of

BlackBerry users around the world across several continents

On Monday October 10, 2011, RIM‟s U.K. data center experienced server problems,

leaving many customers in the dark with prolonged interruptions of their messaging service –

mainly with BBM, web browsing and email capabilities. Unsatisfied users immediately took to

social media – particularly Twitter – to express frustrations, which resulted in the creation of the

DearBlackBerry trending topic.

Almost as shocking as the incident itself, was the lack of communication through social

media that RIM, a company that grew its reputation by being at the forefront of technology and

communication, offered the media and its affected customers in North America, Europe, Africa

and Asia. Worsening the situation for RIM and BlackBerry was the release of Apple‟s iPhone

4S the same week and the growing popularity of Android smart phones that had been luring

away BlackBerry users for several months.

Many subscribers were without services for 3 days, which combined with RIM‟s tight lip

and only 2 brief tweets over those 3 days, allowed the problems publicized by users to be

significantly inflated since not all users experienced all problems. As consumer goods

companies are the most likely to experience a social media crisis, generally triggered by a public

dissatisfaction with a product, it was key for RIM to assure users they were working on

alleviating the problem and reiterating their gratitude for their customers‟ loyal business. The

public was already aware of the problem so ignoring it simply provided individuals a platform to

„fill in the blank‟ as to what they believed the problem was. As a result, rumors that BlackBerry

was up for sale and RIM was expected to break up swirled across the Internet. Beyond these

inconveniences, the service outage affected U.S. federal agencies, including the Federal Reserve

and the U.S. Treasury, taking RIM‟s silence beyond irresponsible and into dangerous.

BlackBerry co-CEO Mike Lazaridis released a public apology video only after the glitch

was cleared, which did little to bridge the gap RIM put between itself and its customers. Nor did

the company make an immediate attempt to make amends by offering the 40 million affected

BlackBerry subscribers a peace offering, like free apps or a discount on their next bill.

Blackberry‟s UK website, where the problem originated, did not so much as post a message

addressing the situation and 2 days into the crisis, the BlackBerry Help Blog had not been

updated in 4 days. BlackBerry help forums also went neglected, while questions and comments

posted to FaceBook were not only ignored, but often blocked and removed.

Tens of thousands of tweets were addressed to BlackBerry‟s multiple handles but those

seeking answers had to settle for “@UK_BlackBerry Message delays were caused by a core

switch failure in RIM‟s infrastructure. Sincerely sorry but now being resolved”, which came over

24 hours into the crisis. The situation deeply affected the value of RIM‟s stock and has

undoubtedly affected sales on other products, like tablets. In not recognizing its customers

intelligence and desire for concrete information, RIM ironically emerged as one of 2011‟s worst

examples of modern communication.