SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) — Email and Internet service to BlackBerry cellphones in North America stopped working for several hours on Monday.
Canada-based Research In Motion, maker of ubiquitous BlackBerry mobile devices that combine telephone, email, and Internet capabilities, notified US and Canadian telecom carriers on Monday afternoon of a major disruption of service.
BlackBerry data services "in the Americas" suffered from "intermittent delays" for about three hours and the problem was fixed in the early evening East Coast time in the United States, according to RIM.
"No messages were lost and message queues began to be cleared after normal service levels were restored," RIM said in an email response to an AFP inquiry.
"RIM continues to focus on providing industry-leading reliability in its products and services and apologizes to customers for any inconvenience."
The problem evidently affected all carriers in North America and was with the RIM network that handles wireless data transmission, not with the telephone network, said AT and T wireless division spokesman Mark Siegel.
"You are not getting email, or have trouble accessing the Internet ... all the data functions," Siegel told AFP during the outage.
BlackBerry was out in Canada and the United States for a couple of hours.
"We heard from RIM that the problem is solved and service restored," Siegel said as evening neared. "It could take a couple of hours to have the backlog of emails, as you can imagine, cleared up."
Telecom firms in both countries were quick to stress that the problem was with RIM's network, not theirs.
"The problem is on the RIM side," Bell Canada spokesman Jason Laszlo told AFP. "I believe it is an issue with the (computer) servers."
Disruption of BlackBerry service is a major bane for business and government employees who rely on the devices to get work done while on the move.
Reliance on BlackBerry "smart phones" is so fierce that they have been jokingly dubbed "CrackBerries" in a reference to a tendency for their owners to compulsively check email as if it were an addiction.
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