Users of BlackBerry smartphones were unable to send or receive email for extended periods on Thursday, throwing enterprise IT systems into chaos and damaging mobile access to the internet.
BlackBerry maker Reasearch in Motion (RIM) acknowledged the widespread service delays in a statement, which it updated late Thursday, saying that the problems had been fixed and that normal service should be restored across the network.
The outage affected only users of RIM’s Blackberry Internet Service, a proprietary network used primarily by non-corporate BlackBerry owners, according to the Toronto Star. Users of BlackBerry Enterprise Service, which links in with other networks, were unaffected. Traffic spiked at websites like crackberry.com, as "frantic" users poured into the forums in an attempt to get more information. Search engine optimization (SEO) efforts targeting mobile tech support sites may have gotten an early holiday bonus.
ZDNet’s Larry Dignan pointed out that the outage comes at a highly inopportune moment for RIM, which released a quarterly earnings statement and held a conference call on the same day, giving analysts the opportunity to ask a number of pointed questions about RIM’s reliability.
