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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
"You are not getting email, or have trouble accessing the Internet … all the data functions," Siegel siad during the outage.<\/p>\n
BlackBerry was out in Canada and the United States for a couple of hours.<\/p>\n
"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."<\/p>\n
Telecom firms in both countries were quick to stress that the problem was with RIM's network, not theirs. <\/p>\n
"The problem is on the RIM side," Bell Canada spokesman Jason Laszlo said. "I believe it is an issue with the (computer) servers."<\/p>\n
RIM did not return telephone or email requests by AFP for comment.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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