BlackBerry outages spread to North America

BlackBerry outages spread to North America

Associated Press

NEW YORK

BlackBerry users across the world were exasperated Wednesday as an outage of email, messaging and Internet services on the phones spread to the U.S. 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 came 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 emails and messages has built up that the company has yet to work down.

Meanwhile, emails and messages from other regions to Europe were piling up in RIM’s systems in the rest of the world, like letters clogging a mailbox. That caused the outages in the U.S. and Asia, said David Yach, RIM’s chief technology officer for software.