BlackBerry Outage Brings About Drop in Car Accidents by 40 Percent
The United Arab Emirates is linking fewer car accidents in the Middle Eastern country to the BlackBerry outage which occurred last week.
The UAE, which suffered from a 3-day Berry blackout, saw a massive decrease in car accidents during the outage, according to The Daily Mail. In Abu Dhabi, crashes declined by 40 percent, while in the kingdom of Dubai, they dropped 20 percent.
“People are slowly starting to realize the dangers of using their phone while driving. The roads became much safer when BlackBerry stopped working,” Brigadier General Hussein Al Harethi, director of the Abu Dhabi Police traffic department, told The National newspaper.
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BlackBerry’s service platform began to experience outages in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and India on Monday, Oct. 10. The problem then spread across the Atlantic, with outages then hitting North and South America.
According to the Washington Post, BlackBerry’s owner, Research in Motion, is unlike other cellphone companies, in that it solely controls email and messaging traffic circulating around the world via one channel, and therefore when a glitch occurs millions are affected.
RIM ultimately attributed the outage to a switch failure at the Slough, England headquarters. Improper functioning was due both to the initial switch failure and then a huge backlog of data surging through the BlackBerry network.
The outage proves untimely, with BlackBerry’s major competitor Apple recently releasing the iPhone 4S, and Google’s Droid unveiling its Ice Cream Sandwich Smartphone in Hong Kong this week.
In light of the outages, BlackBerry promised a release of free premium applications totaling $100 in value. The first of these applications, DriveSafely, encourages BlackBerry users to drive safely by reading text messages and emails out loud, ensuring the driver will remain hands free behind the wheel.
Additionally, a Facebook campaign has recently been implemented to encourage BlackBerry users to refrain from using BlackBerry Messenger while driving.
According to the tech blog zdnet.com, this outage has come at an inopportune time for the Waterloo, Ontario, based company, primarily because the company must release new products during the competing Apple and Android releases, and RIM relies heavily on emerging markets for profit.
