ICT in the News

In today’s world news there are many stories concerning IT and recently there have been some big stories within the world of IT that have reached worldwide news.

The biggest of these stories would have to be the breakdown of the BlackBerry network and services. The glitch happened on Monday 10^th October 2011 and was blamed on a server fault at BlackBerry manufacturer Research in Motion. The network, that disabled owners of a BlackBerry device to use services such as email, messaging and web browsing, was down for a number of days before all services could be restored and put back to normal, the main service that customers were complaining about was the collapse of the favored BlackBerry Messenger, more commonly known as BBM, as this, when working, enabled users to send free messages to other BlackBerry devices, the network was reported to be down across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Another huge news story over the last few months was the London riots, and these riots are hugely reported over social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, many people either boasted about how they were involved in the riots, uploaded pictures of themselves in the riots (an example below), invited others to join in with the riots, planned attacks on buildings or simply just commenting on the events that happening over the time of the riots. And, following these social media activities that were carried out, the police and the government have managed to track down many of the people that were involved in the riots.