Bob CollinsToday has been brought to you by the word, “wait.”
First, an outage of BlackBerries is spreading quickly. The outage, blamed on a network failure, was originally limited to overseas, but it jumped to Canada and the United States overnight.
“The resolution of this service issue is our number one priority right now and we are working night and day to restore all BlackBerry services to normal levels,” RIM said on its website.
The situation has left the door open for a hoax, the company also says:
RIM is aware of a hoax message that has been circulated recently amongst certain BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) users. This is a hoax chain message. The message did not originate from RIM and does not impact the security of BlackBerry smartphones. Hoax messages are unfortunately an industry-wide issue. Any social messaging application on any platform, mobile or PC can be used to attempt to convince users to forward such hoax messages to one or more of their contacts. RIM recommends that users simply ignore the message and do not forward it, since this would only serve to expand the reach of the hoax message.
This is the hoax message:
“This is the real broadcast from Blackberry All rights reserved. Broadcast this message to every single contact on your BBM to reset your display picture, sorry for any inconvenience. This message is to inform all of our users, that our servers have recently been really full, so we are asking for your help to fix this problem. We need our active users to re-send this message to everyone on your contact list in order to confirm our active users that use BlackBerry Messenger, if you do not send this message to all your BlackBerry Messenger contacts then your account will remain inactive with the consequence of losing all your contacts Symbol will automatic update in your BBM ,when you broadcast this message. Your blackberry will be updated within 24 hours it will have a new lay out and a new color for chat.”
Don’t do any of that.
But most of the online screams of anguish today have involved people trying to upgrade the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch to iOs 5 that Apple made available today. Apparently, if you attempted to update your iPhone, and it went well, it might be a good day to buy a lottery ticket.
Most users with problems are getting a 3200 error, with the message that an “internal error” occurred, and that the upgrade process has been cancelled. Other users, CNET reports, have had problems after the update, with iTunes reporting error messages.
Apple is not yet responding to the reports of problems, but the site, Razorianfly, has diagnosed some of them.
The 3200 error: This error is usually associated with the use of the “Update” option, instead of the “Restore” option. To those people, we suggest grabbing yourself a copy of iOS 5 from Apple’s servers directly.
Once downloaded, while holding the Option (Shift) key, click the “Restore” button under iTunes’ Summary tab. Navigate to the copy of iOS 5 you managed to download from Apple’s servers and iTunes should do the rest.
Several users on Facebook who have reported problems have indicated that by trying again and again, the update eventually will hold.
Cult of Mac says the problem stems from the demand for the update. “If you haven’t already started to update your iPhone you might want to wait until either tomorrow or later this week,” it suggests.
Maybe you could pass the time by reviewing the new features you’d have if you could get the update:
