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BlackBerry outage spreads to North America (Update:They're back, sort of)
The BlackBerry service outage that affected Europe and Africa yesterday, has now spread to the United States and Canada
The recent outage is not good news for RIM (image courtesy of Engadget)
Published on Oct 13, 2011
As reported earlier, BlackBerries around the world have been suffering from major service outages. At the time, RIM made a statement on the issue, yet network outages have now spread to North America, causing frustrations for people who rely on these smartphones for business and personal communications.
The company confirmed that a bug on a Blackberry server was responsible for knocking millions offline on Monday, and the Canadian smartphone maker elaborated on Tuesday that the continued interruption was caused by a core switch failure and a backlog of e-mails.
The outage - and RIM's slow reaction to it - have fanned rising dissatisfaction with its co-chief executives, Jim Balsillie, and Mike Lazzaridis.
Critics have long been calling for a major shake-up, saying the top executives have let the company fall far behind Apple, Google, and Microsoft in a changing market.
As far as the outage itself goes, it's hugely problematic that RIM, besides lacking communication about the cause of the problem, hasn't been able to end the outage just yet. It's also taking a serious toll on the company's reputation.
As of today, no firm timeline has been issued as to when the outage will be resolved. For RIM's sake, lets hope soon.
Update: We just got word that some BlackBerry services (besides web browsing in Europe) are going back up across the world! I have to say, I am quite suprised. Hooray!
