North American outage hits BlackBerry users
The firm didn't say why service was unavailable from Tuesday evening until yesterday morning.
NEW YORK - Most of it happened outside "work" hours, but the nature of mobile e-mail meant plenty of dismay as BlackBerry service went down across North America from Tuesday evening to yesterday morning.
Research in Motion Ltd., the Canadian company that provides the devices and e-mail service, disclosed no details about the cause.
The outage cut off incoming and outgoing e-mail on BlackBerry devices regardless of which cellular company a user buys the service from, indicating that the problem originated at RIM's network data center in Canada.
That facility serves as a hub for RIM's North American traffic, routing messages between the roughly eight million BlackBerry devices now in use and the various sources of e-mail, from private corporate servers to Web-based accounts like Yahoo Inc. and AOL L.L.C.
The outage reverberated on Wall Street, too. RIM's share price slid yesterday morning, but recovered and rallied.
The stock rose $3.10, or 2.4 percent, to close at $134.37 yesterday on the Nasdaq Stock Market despite falling as low as $128.80 in the opening minutes.
BlackBerry outages have been rare, although minor glitches occasionally cause delays in RIM's ability to deliver e-mail in real time - perhaps the most important feature of the service for many users. The last two major disruptions appear to have occurred nearly two years ago, both in June 2005.
Nevertheless, even one outage is unbearable for some.
"It's been most inconvenient," said Dacrie Brooks, a public relations professional attending the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters in Las Vegas. She said she had been using her BlackBerry "for all my communications because I don't have access to my laptop between meetings."
"It's been a challenging day because I'm missing things left and right. That's not fun."
Other users shrugged at the disruption.
"My life wasn't affected in any serious way by the outage," said Dimitri Vorontzov, a courtship instructor for the personal coaching service Charisma Arts, noting that he is usually near a computer to fetch his e-mail anyway. "If you didn't tell me, I wouldn't have really noticed," he said.