First of all, this outage is objectively egregious. Second, RIM compounded the anger with scant and cryptic communication. Third, this is not the first crippling outage for BBerry. Fourth and most influential, the incident fits right into the media's current RIM meta-narrative, in which RIM is the gang that couldn't shoot straight but is blinded to its own shortcomings by willful arrogance. To the tech press this fits right into (and validates) the RIM-can't-get-anything-right storyline they have been writing for the past year or so already. If Apple had suffered the same episode it would have been excused in the media as a rare departure from normative excellence.