BlackBerry Blackout

by Mary Ann Romans | More from this Blogger

12 Feb 2008 12:25 PM

Yesterday afternoon, BlackBerry email service went down, leaving users in the dark, so to speak. The popular smart phone device, by Research in Motion (RIM) experienced the email failure due to and outage in the RIM network.

Delays and loss of functionality was intermittent yesterday, with service coming on and off, for 12 million subscribers with BlackBerrys in North America. Along with email failure came the inability to register the device, browse the Internet or roam in different locations. Voice and SMS was said not to be affected.

The service outage began yesterday (Monday) at 3:20 ET and lasted about three hours. BlackBerry has several different carriers, and while all carriers were affected, not all BlackBerry users were.

The outage is said to have affected everyone from those trying to conduct business deals to those reporting on the latest political nominees. BlackBerrys are the device of choice for business executives. The BlackBerry Pearl is very popular with consumers. No messages were lost during the outage, just delayed, RIM reports.

RIM experienced two other major outages recently. The previous outages took place in April and September 2007. In the past, RIM has angered consumers by not acknowledging problems right away and then not giving clear explanations of what occurred and why it occurred.

RIM says that it is too early to know exactly what happened yesterday but that a team is currently working on figuring out what happened.

A few angry users went so far as to ask RIM to supply users with a back up smart phone or palm device in the event of another outage.

RIM has a has a nine-year history with the BlackBerry device.

Were you affected by the BlackBerry black out? What steps, if any, should RIM take to ensure that future outages do not occur? Do you think that we reply too much on these types of devices? Please let me know what you think.

Mary Ann Romans writes about everything related to saving money in the Frugal Blog, technology in the Computing Blog, and creating a home in the Home Blog. You can read more of her articles by clicking here.

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Learn more about Mary Ann Romans

Mary Ann Romans is a freelance writer, wife and mother of three children. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, the kids and a 16-pound cat.

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