Research In Motion said it restored service after its BlackBerry users in North and South America suffered a second major outage in less than a week. The company blamed the outage on a flaw in recent updates to its BlackBerry Messenger service.
RIM said in a statement that the service disruption began Tuesday afternoon and that email messages were delayed. RIM said phone and SMS services were not affected.
"Root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure. RIM has taken corrective action to restore service," the company said in a statement. "RIM has also provided a new version of BlackBerry Messenger (version 5.0.0.57) and is encouraging anyone who downloaded or upgraded BlackBerry Messenger since December 14th to upgrade to this latest version which resolves the issue. RIM continues to monitor its systems to maintain normal service levels and apologizes for any inconvenience to customers."
Representatives from AT&T Mobility, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless confirmed that their customers were affected.
A Sprint spokeswoman, Crystal Davis, told FierceWireless that both consumer and enterprise BlackBerry customers were affected, and that the outage crippled BlackBerry Internet, email and text messaging services, but not voice services. The statement seemed to contradict RIM's assertion that only email services were disrupted. A RIM spokeswoman did not address follow-up questions about the disruption.
Last week, RIM said BlackBerry customers experienced delays in receiving email. That outage came on the same day RIM reported third-quarter earnings showing strong profits and revenue growth.
For more:
- see this PCMag.com article
- see this Toronto Star article
- see this Bloomberg article
Related Articles:
RIM resolves BlackBerry email outage
BlackBerry users hit with temporary email outage
BlackBerry outage hits Cingular, T-Mobile, Nextel
BlackBerry service outage in U.S., Asia, Europe