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BlackBerry users suffer email withdrawal

TheStar.com - BlackBerry users suffer email withdrawal

HICHAM SAFIEDDINE
STAFF REPORTER

The BlackBerry crowd in parts of North America had to go cold turkey for a few hours yesterday.

From New York to Washington to Ottawa, the wireless email service was down in some areas temporarily, leaving business people, traders and political figures without their accustomed communication. Service interruption lasted up to almost four hours in the United States.

MeeJin Annan-Brady, spokeswoman for Research In Motion Ltd., the Waterloo-based company that makes the popular devices, said the exact cause of the disruption was not clear. The company had not yet released an official statement last night.

RIM has an estimated 3 million BlackBerry subscribers, and two-thirds of its $1.35 billion (U.S.) revenue was generated in the United States last year.

Since their launch several years ago, BlackBerrys have become widely used among financial analysts, political figures and professionals in communications-intense businesses.

"I've always thought of it as infallible," Jennifer Myers, director of strategy for consulting firm Interbrand, told Bloomberg News in New York. "It has never happened to me before. It concerns me because there was no indication of what was going on."

The impact in Canada of yesterday's unusual occurrence appeared to be less severe than that in the U.S. Some Rogers customers experienced delays for about an hour early in the day, said spokeswoman Heather Armstrong. She said the delay in relaying messages was due to a server and not a network problem. "My understanding is that RIM conducted some maintenance last night," she said. "I think it was not until early today when people started using them that (RIM) recognized there might still be a problem."

Rogers provides networking services for its BlackBerry clients. Other mobile carriers of BlackBerrys affected were T-Mobile, Nextel Communication and Cingular in the United States. Armstrong said updates about service problems were available at the company's subscriber helpline.

RIM runs its email paging service by operating data centres that direct email between BlackBerry devices and a company's internal network.

On Parliament Hill, fierce BlackBerry users in Prime Minister Paul Martin's office found themselves with off-and-on service for a couple of hours in the morning.

Yet after an intense few weeks in federal politics, sitting at the precipice of a snap election, the breakdown was more of a refreshing break. "We were down for two hours or so. Didn't cause any disruptions to the business of government," said Scott Reid, Martin's communications director.

With files from Susan Delacourt and BLOOMBERG

June 18, 2005 at 11:11 AM in email | Permalink | TrackBack (10) | Top of page | Blog Home