BlackBerry E-mail and Internet Fail, Again

Posted 12/24/2009 at 12:28pm | by Bart Salisbury

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This is probably old news for some BlackBerry users, but to keep the rest of us in the loop, BlackBerry’s e-mail and Internet services went off line Tuesday night to Wednesday morning, the second failure of the system in less than a week.

The service outage hit BlackBerry users in North and South America, starting about 6:30 p.m. Tuesday evening, and continuing until 2:45 a.m. Wednesday morning. The outage appears to have been an unintended consequence of a software upgrade--same as in the other recent instance, and one that occurred 18 months ago. According to RIM the software update “caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure.”

The outage left some BlackBerry users miffed. But, according to The New York Times, wireless industry analysts say that users looking for a more reliable system are apt to be disappointed. Consumer Reports magazine says that BlackBerry is the leader in wireless data services, regardless of carrier. The only option for BlackBerry’s users, then, is something worse than what they’ve got.

Image Credit: RIM