RIM Faults Its Own App In Outage

This article was written by CNET News.com's Tom Krazit.

Research in Motion has pushed out new software to correct a problem that left some BlackBerry users high and dry Tuesday.

A new version of BlackBerry Messenger is available that apparently fixes the problems experienced by BlackBerry customers, according to a report by Bloomberg Business Week. For several hours yesterday BlackBerry users were unable to use the data services on their phones, preventing e-mails from being received and applications from working correctly.

In a statement provided to Computerworld, RIM said the "root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure. RIM has taken corrective action to restore service."

BlackBerry Messenger version 5.0.0.57 is the one to install if you're currently running either version described above, and that should be available through the phone's browser or in BlackBerry App World. Tuesday's outage follows another one last week that was shorter in duration.

By Tom Krazit