Is Blackberry down? BBOutages.com

I had to smile seeing this website however I doubt RIM's PR or Legal teams shared my humour.

RimOutages.com has now become Dataoutages.com (I suspect after a call from someone at Research in Motion)

The website has been setup to let people know when the Blackberry Services is Down or Up.

Following the recent number of outages it seems that someone has deemed it necessary to create such a site.

Of course you'll probably have to sign up with another email address than the one on your Blackberry device otherwise if the service is down you won't get it.  Since the last few outages I'm surprised that RIM themselves haven't been more proactive in addressing this as many customer I've spoken to have stated that these outages have really rocked people's perception of the stability of Blackberry. 

The Dataoutages.com website claims 99.8% uptime for the RIM service which is still 17hrs of outage for the year and a long way behind the 4 and 5 9's uptime most organisations measure themselves against.

Five nines = 99.999% = 5 minutes 35 seconds downtime a year

Four nines = 99.99% = 52 minutes 33 seconds downtime a year