BlackBerry outage persists and spreads

NEW YORK - BlackBerry users across the world were exasperated Wednesday as an outage of e-mail, messaging, and Internet services on the phones spread to the United States and Canada and stretched into the third day for Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

It was the biggest outage in years for BlackBerry users and strained their relationship with an already tarnished brand. It happened on the eve of the launch of a mighty competitor - a new iPhone model.

Research in Motion Ltd., the Canadian company that makes the phones, said a crucial link in its European infrastructure failed Monday, and a backup didn't work either. The underlying problem has been fixed, but a backlog of e-mails and messages has built up that the company has yet to work down.

Meanwhile, e-mails and messages from other regions of Europe are piling up in Research in Motion's systems in the rest of the world, like letters clogging a mailbox. That's causing the outages in the U.S. and Asia, said David Yach, the company's chief technology officer for software.

Research in Motion already is struggling with delays in getting new phones out, a tablet that's been a dud, and a stock price approaching a five-year low. In the latest quarter, it sold 10.6 million phones, down from 12.1 million in the same period last year.

The duration of the latest outage could force large businesses to rethink their use of BlackBerrys, analyst Carolina Milanesi said. Many of them have stuck with the phones because of the quality and efficiency of the company's e-mail system, but that's now in question, she said.

Consumers are having second thoughts, too. Andrew Mills, 27, a child-abuse investigator for the state of Arkansas, said he'd been thinking of getting a different smartphone for a while and the outage was the "nail in the coffin" for him.

He has used BlackBerrys for five years, but friends and family have abandoned them, and he's set to do so in a few weeks.

Unlike other cellphone makers, Research in Motion handles e-mail and messaging traffic to and from its phones. That allows it to provide services other phones don't have, to optimize data service, and to provide top-class security.

But when it encounters a problem, a large share of the 70 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide can be affected at once. BlackBerry outages tend to occur several times a year, but they usually last less than a day.

Research in Motion shares fell 53 cents to close at $23.88 in New York trading. The shares fell to $19.29 a week ago, the lowest since 2006.