17 Oct

BlackBerry Outage Makes Roads Safer

Posted in News on 17.10.11 by John Meloche

Last week, BlackBerry users worldwide practically lost their minds when their services were disrupted for a short period of time. Unable to send BBM messages – quick texts specific to users of the network – to fellow users many people became very frustrated. This, in fact, was pretty evident, here at Synergy Marketing Consultants headquarters.

“When you pay for a service, you expect to get it,” explained one of our reps, “I wasn’t all that upset but I know a lot of people who were. I tried to remind some of my friends that just a few years ago, we were quite content to just call or even text each other. Not being able to use BBM for a day isn’t the end of the world!”

Nevertheless, many BlackBerry owners became so enraged at the outage that they spoke of changing over to the iPhone. The Toronto Sta ‘s business reporter, Dana Flavelle writes, however, that there was definitely one upside to the temporary BlackBerry shutdown of last week.

She writes that during the outage, in some countries, the number of traffic accidents and fatalities noticeably decreased! In fact, “in the Middle Eastern countries of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, where BlackBerry service was interrupted for three days, accidents fell by 20 to 40 per cent, according to the local English-language newspaper, The National.”

In Ontario, as with many other places in the world, talking and texting on cell phones while driving is illegal. The obvious distraction from keeping one’s eyes on the road has lead to many a car crash in the past. The passing of the law was inevitable. That doesn’t mean that everyone follows it, however!

Flavelle writes that the impact of the BlackBerry shutdown was less evident in Ontario, where service was down for less than a day. There were very few traffic accidents reported during the outage but it was difficult to determine if it was related to less usage of cell phones behind the wheel.

Abu Dhabi police, on the other hand, reported that “they noticed a significant decline in traffic accidents involving young men, the group most likely to be using a BlackBerry while driving, during the outage. Traffic accidents fell 20 per cent in Dubai and 40 per cent in Abu Dhabi, police said, and there were no fatalities.”

Comments Off on BlackBerry Outage Makes Roads Safer