Blacberry Outage

Blacberry Outage, BlackBerry users across the world were exasperated Wednesday as an outage of email, messaging and Internet services on the phones spread to the U.S. and Canada and stretched into the third day for Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa.

In a letter posted Wednesday on RIM’s website Robin Bienfait, RIM’s chief information officer, apologized for service interruptions and delays. Unlike other cellphone makers, RIM handles email and messaging traffic to and from its phones. That allows it to provide services that other phones don’t have, optimize data service and provide top-class security. One of the BlackBerry’s big attractions is the BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM, which works like text messaging but doesn’t incur extra fees. That service was affected by the outage, and to make matters worse for RIM, Apple Inc. is releasing software Wednesday for its iPhones that works like BBM.

We're well into day three of a huge outage for the BlackBerry smartphone network. Not the kind of buzz likely to keep BlackBerry users being BlackBerry users for very long.

The disruptions in email, instant-messaging and Web browsing—which forced many BlackBerry users to resort to phone calls and faxes—affected most of the Canadian company's key markets, including North America, Europe and Asia, and a big chunk of its 70 million world-wide subscribers.