Indonesia’s ICT Minister: BlackBerry Sales Drop 70% in Indonesia
Credit: BlackberryCool.com BlackBerry users around the world might be questioning their loyalty after another outage of the popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service happened a couple of days ago. It was widely reported that the service was down for users living in the Asia Pacific region between Sunday night to Monday morning, and today BlackBerry Indonesia finally acknowledged 1 the downtime and offered an apology. The most interesting part of the story, in my mind, is the statement given by the Indonesian ICT minister Tifatul Sembiring on this latest incident (as reported by another Detik article). Mr. Sembiring said he is disappointed that the company did not notify its users sooner about the setback, and he added that BlackBerry sales have decreased by 70 percent in Indonesia. There’s no source to back up the minister’s claim, however. According to various users on the Crackberry forums, the BBM outage happened across Indonesia, Australia, Hong Kong, Thailand, India, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, and Malaysia. Customers’ trust in BlackBerry in that region must have been shaken up again. The same BBM service suffered an even longer downtime last October. BlackBerry is up against Android, iOS, and Windows Phone as more Indonesians switch to smartphones.
The explanation given by a BlackBerry Indonesia representative to Detik was that there was an internet connectivity disturbance in the Asia Pacific region on Sunday which also affected a lot of telecommunication and internet services. That incident also hit BlackBerry service in Southeast Asia. The same report pointed out that the representative did not specify what this disturbance really was. ↩
(Sources: Detik #1, #2, and Kompas)
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