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BlackBerry Service Outage Hits North American Users

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By ANICK JESDANUN, The Associated Press

Published: February 12, 2008

NEW YORK - A major service outage afflicted users of the popular, addictive BlackBerry smart phones across the United States and Canada on Monday.

Officials with AT&T and Verizon Wireless said that BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. told them customers of all wireless carriers were affected.

It was not clear how many of the 12 million worldwide BlackBerry subscribers had problems, as some users reported being able to access their service normally Monday afternoon.

But Garth Turner, a member of the Canadian Parliament, said during a caucus meeting that the outage - the second widespread disruption in 10 months - was having a big impact.

"Everyone's in crisis because they're all picking away at their BlackBerrys and nothing's happening," Turner said. "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."
Bell Canada spokesman Jason Laszlo said the majority of its BlackBerry customers were affected.

"There's really no estimated time of repair," Laszlo said.

In a statement, RIM said a "data service interruption" was resulting in "intermittent service delays for BlackBerry subscribers in North America." The company said voice and text messaging services were not affected.

A technical support recording for Canadian wireless provider Rogers Communications said subscribers could have difficulties sending and receiving messages, activating accounts and using other services such as Internet browsing.

The company was "working with our vendor to resolve this issue," the recording said. There was no word on what caused the outage or when service would be restored.

Major disruptions have been rare but often provoke an angry backlash against RIM because of its typically lengthy silences about the cause and because it eventually gives only cryptic, jargon-laden explanations.

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