BlackBerry Blackout Across U.S., Canada

Service Restored After Three-Hour Outage Frustrates Users Once Again

(AP)  BlackBerry outages are rare, but when they do hit, like one did Monday that wiped out service across United States and Canada, subscribers who have become addicted to the smart phones are quick to unleash their fury.

"I'm mad — it's enough already," said a frustrated Stuart Gold, who said he gets 1,000 e-mails a day as director of field marketing for Web analytics company Omniture Inc. and can't afford the downtime.

Gold, who worked most of Monday on a laptop while traveling, plans to ask his company to buy him a backup smart phone from a rival like Palm Inc., which makes the Treo, in case BlackBerry service goes on the fritz again.

"I don't know what happened, I don't care what happened. They need to save their excuses for someone who cares," Gold said.

It was not immediately clear late Monday what caused the outage - the second widespread disruption in less than a year. Some users reported being able to access their service normally.

Research in Motion Ltd., the Waterloo, Ontario-based company that makes the ubiquitous mobile device, said late Monday that customers "experienced intermittent delays" beginning around 3:30 p.m. EST, but data service was restored about three hours later. The company said voice and text messaging services were not affected.

"No messages were lost and message queues began to be cleared after normal service levels were restored,' RIM said, apologizing to customers for the inconvenience.

The company did not say how many customers were affected, though officials with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless said RIM told them the outage hit customers of all wireless carriers.

Bell Canada spokesman Jason Laszlo said the majority of its BlackBerry customers were affected.

RIM has 12 million subscribers worldwide and has deals with scores of wireless carriers to offer the BlackBerry service around the world.

On Monday, users described frantic moments of tapping away at disabled machines before realizing an outage had zapped their service.

"Everyone's in crisis because they're all picking away at their BlackBerrys and nothing's happening," Garth Turner, a member of the Canadian Parliament, said during a caucus meeting. "It's almost like cutting the phone cables or a total collapse in telegraph lines a century ago. It just isolates people in a way that's quite phenomenal."

The BlackBerry service, which lets users check e-mail and access other data services on their handheld devices, has become a lifeline for many business executives and is increasingly popular among consumers with models like the BlackBerry Pearl.

Outages have been rare in the device's nine-year history.

The last major BlackBerry outage happened last April, when a minor software upgrade crashed the system, triggering complaints from always-on users all the way up to the White House and Canada's Parliament. A smaller disruption happened in September, when a software glitch stanched the flow of e-mails to subscribers.

The previous BlackBerry outages have prompted angry backlashes against RIM because of the company's lengthy silences about what caused them and the cryptic and jargon-laden explanations that eventually emerge.

RIM waited two days after the April outage before telling customers what happened.

The last major failures were nearly two years before that. The company angered users by waiting hours before confirming the problem, then issuing a confusing technological description of what happened.

[rf35]

See what happens when people lose their Blackberry service...you get random posts from the likes of dragonking5 and luvcbs3.

Really, it is sad to see people react this way to a 3-hour outage. I bet if they got stuck somewhere with no service for a day, they would just die. Anyone that dependent on a piece of technology needs counseling. They are like the Borg from Star Trek...if they get cut off from their network, they cease to function.

[neoconslayer]

luvcbs3: your commnet is irrelevant to this story.
I guess it is your entire existence in microcosm...

[gce65]

Are they jonesing from the temporary loss of their CRACKberries?

[brianbwb-2009]

It is also in my view false to say that life in AMERICA today is solely determined by considerations of foreign policy, that the primacy of foreign policy governs today the whole of our domestic life. Certainly people can reach the point when foreign relations influence and determine completely its domestic life. But let no one say that such a CONDITION is from the first either natural or desirable. Rather the important thing is that people should CREATE the conditions for CHANGE in this state of affairs. Posted by pilgrimsway

Regardless of who said it, is it, or is it not truth?

Truth is a tool that, in the hands of the wrong people can be put to ill use, but that does not diminish the fact that it is truth.

[brianbwb-2009]

Will they get a refund, or a credit for the lost service?

I doubt it.

To luvcbs3

While I can say that you are among the first of these posters to come cleanly out of the closet, and post your true fear of "Black" people becoming president, and therefore show at least a bit more integrity than those who hide their ignorance and fear behind other ridiculous reasoning, like "He is a Muslim" and such nonsense, still it is not the subject of this thread, and will probably be better received on the kkk sites.

[jeepmanjr]

I can only think of one thing worse... Being a Nextel subscriber with a Blackberry. Now THAT sucks!!

[pilgrimsway-2009]

We know by the charisma who said this!

It is also in my view false to say that life in AMERICA today is solely determined by considerations of foreign policy, that the primacy of foreign policy governs today the whole of our domestic life. Certainly people can reach the point when foreign relations influence and determine completely its domestic life. But let no one say that such a CONDITION is from the first either natural or desirable. Rather the important thing is that people should CREATE the conditions for CHANGE in this state of affairs.


Answer

Hit-lers quote Jan 27 1932

[luvcomments]

Time to drag the ham radios outta storage. Tht''s what Verizon did a couple of days ago in Idaho when a town couldn''t call 911 for some "unknown" reason. They had to call the fire station in their own prefix number which, in turn used ham radios to contact the appropriate 911 emergency agency. Pretty high tech, huh? :)

[thahn3]

OH NO!!!!!!
You have a phone in your hand idiot ...call someone.

[bm6005]

Good! Maybe now all of the hyperactive users will act like people instead of "speeding" nuts.