BlackBerry hit by major disruption
Canada-based Research In Motion, maker of ubiquitous BlackBerry mobile devices that combine telephone, email, and Internet capabilities, notified US and Canadian telecom carriers on Monday afternoon of a major disruption of service.
The problem evidently affected all carriers in North America and was with the RIM network that handles wireless data transmission, not with the telephone network, said AT&T wireless division spokesman Mark Siegel.
"You are not getting email, or have trouble accessing the Internet … all the data functions," Siegel siad during the outage.
BlackBerry was out in Canada and the United States for a couple of hours.
"We heard from RIM that the problem is solved and service restored," Siegel said as evening neared. "It could take a couple of hours to have the backlog of emails, as you can imagine, cleared up."
Telecom firms in both countries were quick to stress that the problem was with RIM's network, not theirs.
"The problem is on the RIM side," Bell Canada spokesman Jason Laszlo said. "I believe it is an issue with the (computer) servers."
RIM did not return telephone or email requests by AFP for comment.
Disruption of BlackBerry service poses a major bane for business and government employees who rely extensively on the devices to get work done while on the move.
Reliance on BlackBerry "smart phones" is so fierce that they have been jokingly dubbed "CrackBerries" in a reference to a tendency for its owners to compulsively check email as if it were an addiction.
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