BlackBerry blacks out

 

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By Reuters

Posted on 12 Feb 2008 at 09:20

A major outage has hit BlackBerry users in North America, cutting off wireless email for political campaign staff on the eve of three US presidential primaries.

The problem, which Research In Motion (RIM) described as a "critical severity outage", hit users Monday afternoon, and though it is now resolved, it has raised further concerns about the stability of the email service after a widespread crash last April.

The last big outage in April 2007 provoked an angry backlash from users, and prompted chief executive Jim Balsillie to describe such incidents as "very rare" and claim that RIM was taking steps to prevent it from happening again.

However, experts have argued that blackouts could drive customers away from the service.

"It's a big issue and it's a growing issue," says Carmi Levy, senior vice-president of strategic consulting at AR Communications, arguing that huge outages could prove to be "a major Achilles' heel" for RIM in the future.

Despite that warning, most users seem to take the outage in good humour.

"While the outage did confirm our widespread addiction to BlackBerry service, fortunately it did not cause more than a temporary inconvenience," says Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman for Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

"It made my life a little bit easier, since I didn't have to reply," Liberal Party spokesman Jean-Francois Del Torchio says. "But when I arrived at my desktop and I saw all the e-mails I received, I was like, 'Oh, I still need to work'."