BlackBerry Service Restored, Slow Response Irksome

BlackBerry service was mostly restored by late morning today EDT, following a widespread North American outage that started Tuesday evening. The interruption left some users irked enough by Research in Motion's laggard customer service that they are considering alternatives.

After repeated attempts to reach RIM representatives in Europe for a response today, followed by additional attempts to reach someone at the company's Waterloo, Ontario, headquarters a written statement was issued to reporters in Europe through its public-relations agency there, confirming what was already known. There was a "service interruption" affecting users in North America and e-mail delivery was delayed or intermittent during the interruption. Phone service on BlackBerry handsets was not affected, according to the statement.

"Root cause is still under review, but service for most customers was restored overnight and RIM is closely monitoring systems in order to maintain normal service levels," the statement said.

Customers on the BlackBerry Forums discussion board complained of having no service starting at about 5.15 p.m. Pacific Time on Tuesday. (If you're among them, please weigh in with our poll about the outage.)

Seeking Information

Apparently, the updates didn't come soon enough for some users, with BlackBerry forums flooded with users with questions.

Users at online forums and others contacted by IDG News Service said late this morning that service was still sporadic. Backlogs of messages were pouring in to BlackBerries, along with some new messages, but service was not yet consistent, users said.

And callers to the BlackBerry U.S. technical support line were still greeted with the following message early this morning: "We are currently experiencing a service interruption that is causing delays in sending or receiving messages. We apologize for the inconvenience and will provide updates as soon as they become available."

Mobile phone carriers in Europe and the U.S. reported this morning that service was back up. However, representatives of several of those companies said that they had yet to hear an explanation from RIM about why the interruption happened. The RIM Web site did not provide information about the outage.

One Man's Story

David Maynor is thinking about dropping his BlackBerry service because of RIM's poor response to the situation. "I'm actually really mad about it. I'm mad enough to switch to another service," said Maynor, who is chief technology officer with Errata Security Inc. in Atlanta. "Everyone makes mistakes but their cardinal sin is that they didn't inform their users."

Maynor, who has been a BlackBerry customer for three years, was without service from about 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time Tuesday night until 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, he said. He couldn't get information on the outage from the BlackBerry Web site, or by calling his carrier's support line where "wait times were insane." Instead, he had to turn to online BlackBerry discussion forums.

How It Started

New York television news channel NewsChannel4 originally reported Tuesday night that the problem affected "all users in the Western hemisphere."

However, comments from operators in Asia and Europe, as well as postings to the BlackBerry Forums, soon suggested that the problem was limited to North America.

RIM officials advised people who use Blackberry as a major way of communications to make back-up plans, the channel reported.

What Happened?

The outage may have been cause by one of RIM's Network Operating Centers (NOC) going down, according to Emma Mohr-McClune, principal analyst with Current Analysis. "This has happened before," she said.

RIM operates two NOCs, both located in Canada, according to Mohr-McClune. The company has considered locating additional NOCs outside of Canada, she said.

Companies that provide BlackBerry service connect their mail servers to a BlackBerry Enterprise Solution (BES) server located on their premises, which in turn is linked to one of RIM's NOCs, according to Mohr-McClune. "All data slides to Canada and back," she said.

RIM may have been fortunate that the outage began at about 5 p.m. Pacific Time, because it would have been after the busiest part of the U.S. work day. Engineers were likely scrambling through the night to bring the service back online before the start of the U.S. workday on Wednesday.

The Rest of the World

Other parts of the world appeared to have been unaffected. A representative for Taiwan Mobile, RIM's BlackBerry partner for the island, said the problem was limited to North America, and that users would not be affected unless they are sending or receiving e-mail through a BlackBerry server there.

"RIM has not communicated with Taiwan Mobile about when this problem might be fixed," said the representative, April Hong.

NTT DoCoMo Inc. in Tokyo said its BlackBerry users in Japan were also unaffected. And In Europe, a spokesman for T-Mobile Deutschland GmbH was unaware of any problems, and Blackberry users in Germany and France reported no interruption of service.

(Peter Sayer, James Niccolai, Dan Nystedt and Martyn Williams contributed to this report.)