Are BlackBerry and London Riots Connected?

The London riots, which was previously thought to have been sparked from impulsive outrage of a section of the crowd against the police, is now believed to be initiated from BlackBerry’s BBM messaging service.

Microsoft’s cloud service, Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), since the riots started, has been subjected to almost seven hours outage in Europe. The disturbance is thought to have been in the same line as that of Amazon EC2 cloud outage.

The police believe that the rioters are making use of BlackBerry’s messenger service to organize themselves. The riots, currently, have continued for the third consecutive day and have spread to other parts of the UK.

The officials have added that the BBM service via BlackBerry has been the most popular means for rioters to communicate. The BlackBerry devices, which are cheaper than most Android and iOS devices, are owned by more than 30 percent of teens in the UK. The service is also free and instantaneous. The conversations are also kept private by exchanging the PIN numbers.

“Everyone from all sides of London meet up at the heart of London (central) OXFORD CIRCUS!!, Bare SHOPS are gonna get smashed up so come get some (free stuff!!!) f*** the feds we will send them back with OUR riot! >:O Dead the ends and colour war for now so if you see a brother… SALUT! if you see a fed… SHOOT!” was one of the conversations among the rioters revealed by The Guardian.

Elsewhere, Global telecommunications company Vodafone has recently announced that the BlackBerry Bold 9900 smartphone will be available for free from £41 ($67) per month on a two year contract. This will include 1200 any network minutes, unlimited texts and 500MB inclusive data allowance, according to an ITProPortal report.