BlackBerry outages spread to the United States and Canada

By Jeffrey Van Camp October 12, 2011

BlackBerry-India — Image used with permission by copyright holder

For several days, millions of users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South America, India and other regions of the world lost their core BB services like BlackBerry Messenger, email, and Web browsing. Now, it appears that reports of problems are continuing to spread, with outages now hitting users in the United States and Canada. Reuters reports. The extent of the North American problem is unknown, but many users have reported delayed or missing email and messages.

“The messaging and browsing delays … were caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure,” said RIM on Tuesday night. “As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service.”

RIM has not yet commented on the problems in North America. Yesterday, we reported that services were starting to come back online in other areas of the world. For some, service has been off since Oct. 9.

With all the problems its been having attracting and retaining users in an increasingly iPhone and Android dominated market, the last thing RIM needs is for its core strength–its network–to go down. Though an outage could happen to any company, this could be viewed as a wake up call by some businesses, which rely heavily on RIM’s services. Hopefully, the company can get things back on track.

BB users, let us know if your service is working.

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