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Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

    ...more than 1.1 million active users in the
    first 8 hours without even launching the
    official Android app – is incredible.

    Consequently, this unreleased version caused
    issues, which we have attempted to address
    throughout the day.

"[C]onsequently" is an odd word to use here.

1.1 million unexpected users overwhelmed the BBM service? I would've expected BBM, given its enterprise-ready status, to be more than capable of handling that kind of extra load.

So, what's the real story? Is it that BBM simply isn't capable of handling bursty load?

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Not sure why you think there's more to the story. It's extremely common for "unreleased" versions of various apps/services to have bottlenecks that the production-ready versions would not. That's typically why they're "unreleased".

Maybe because Blackberry just halted a worldwide rollout of their Android AND iPhone BBM product without saying why?

If this isn't a service-overload issue, I'm having a hard time imagining what kind of problems this unreleased Android version could have caused.

They themselves said "..this unreleased version caused issues". That could be referring to anything - including service-overload issues but I don't know why that would be that surprising.

This is exactly why companies like to have tight control of the roll-out of new products. They want to find these types of bottle-necks and glitches in rather controlled environments.

worldwide rollout

But there was no such rollout. An unreleased version leaked.

My guess is that these 1.1. million active users found a problem in the service that the beta tester could not. Probably related to its integration with Android / iPhone.

If anything BB should be thankful to the leaker. It would be a lot worse if the issue was found when it's used by millions of legitimate user

If 1.1 million users are so desperate to sign up without you actually launching, then there's potentially a heck of a lot more waiting for a proper launch. Their business will be used to dealing with one user = one phone, so the growth of the service will be predictable. Now they have to deal with a virtually unlimited number of users while also supporting actual customers.

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