Thursday, December 24, 2009
TORONTO (AP) — The second BlackBerry outage in less than a week disrupted service for millions of users on two continents, frustrating people so reliant on the messaging devices that they peck at their keyboards all day and keep the gadgets on their nightstands while they sleep.
When the problems began Tuesday afternoon, Twitter and other online forums were peppered with laments about the failure of a gadget that has been dubbed the “CrackBerry” because it can be so addictive.
“If my BlackBerry is down, everything is down,” said Sarah Whalen, 22, of New York. She said her BlackBerry did not resume working until Wednesday afternoon.
The company behind the service, Canada’s Research in Motion Ltd., blamed a software upgrade for the problem, which it said was confined to North and South America.
RIM said BlackBerry users were unable to send or receive e-mails and instant messages but did not lose phone service. Many users also found the Internet inaccessible. RIM said the disruptions began around 1:45 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, worsened around 6:30 p.m. and began to be fixed around 11:30 p.m. It would not say how long the outage lasted or exactly how many users were affected.
The glitch comes after another outage last Thursday and at least three breakdowns in 2008. The latest problems are happening at an especially bad time for RIM, which is facing tougher competition than ever before in the market it helped pioneer.
“One of RIM’s big advantages is that it’s perceived as a reliable device,” said Duncan Stewart, director of research and analysis at DSam Consulting. “To lose the advantage of reliability would, in fact, be a very big deal for this company.”
In Toronto, Corey Marshall, 23, said he bases most of his social life on his BlackBerry, using the phone’s messaging services to keep in touch with many of his friends. When the services went down, he had no way to contact them because he had never exchanged phone numbers.
“I was literally talking to six people over BlackBerry Messenger and all of a sudden nobody was replying,” Marshall said. “I kept unplugging my phone, turning it off and on. I was getting very upset when it wouldn’t work.”
RIM has sold more than 75 million BlackBerrys since the gadget debuted 10 years ago. It now counts 36 million subscribers around the globe and ranks second in the worldwide market for advanced “smart phones,” with a 21 percent share, behind Nokia Corp.’s 39 percent, according to market research firm Gartner Inc.