Stat of the day: 20 hours

BlackBerry season ended early yesterday, after a power outage at a Slough data centre owned by Research In Motion (the company behind the smartphones) which prevented thousands of users across Europe, the Middle East and Africa from using email, browsing the web or using the BlackBerry Messenger service. Guess no riots were organised last night…

BlackBerry users clearly aren’t impressed: while the number of people buying smartphones, including BlackBerrys, has exploded, RIM has been criticised for failing to grow its infrastructure to keep up with demand. As one former RIM employee told The Guardian: ‘[The company] didn’t start looking at scalability until about 2007, when they had around 8m active devices. The attitude was, "we’re going to grow and grow but making sure our infrastructure can support it isn’t a priority".’ Given RIM’s recent performance, that’s exactly the kind of accusation it could do without.