Blackberry's across the US and Canada suffered a major crash of their email service on Monday afternoon and were reduced to mere cellphones as Research In Motion Ltd had a data service interruption. The outage which lasted for about 4 hours from just after midday affected all users regardless of the carrier that they are with.
Voice and text messaging were not affected and were working as normal. Many business people along with politicians, celebrities and many 'mere mortals' were affected by the loss of service.
This is not the first time that Blackberrys have had problems. They had a major break in service in April 2007 due to poorly tested equipment. In 2006 users in Toronto also suffered a loss in service when a power pole was knocked down.
In other news, RIM have signed a deal with Vodaphone Group PLC. Vodaphone, which is the worlds largest mobile phone company (by revenue) announced that it will add Blackberrys to its preferred list of consumer platforms. This is seen as a move by RIM to expand its broader regular consumer base and reducing its reliance on the corporate users.
Brian McQuirk
