BlackBerry Users See Some E-Mail, RIM Says It’s Working on Problem

By DAVID FRIEND

TORONTO (CP) – E-mail began to trickle in to North American BlackBerry users Wednesday morning after an outage the night before brought traffic to many of the portable devices to a screeching halt.

Users began to report trouble with BlackBerry e-mail as early as 8 p.m. ET Tuesday, and the company said Wednesday morning it was attempting to find out what caused the massive system failure that blocked BlackBerry e-mail for millions of users.

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

“E-mail delivery was delayed or intermittent during the service interruption.”

Phone service on BlackBerry handhelds was not affected.

A spokeswoman at a firm that represents Waterloo-based Research In Motion (TSX:RIM) said there had been no word from management explaining the failure.

Some users on BlackBerry forums said they were starting to see signs of life on their devices Wednesday morning as e-mails sent the night before began to pour in. But many were still waiting.

“This certainly suggests that this was the type of catastrophic failure that exceeded their contingency plans,” said Jesse Hirsh, a technology industry watcher for Openflows Networks.

“Certainly customers and shareholders should ask after today whether their contingency plans were sufficient. Guaranteed they had redundant systems that allowed for a minor outage. This suggests something went horribly wrong.”

Shares in RIM dropped 0.9 per cent or $1.30 to $147.52 in early trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

And as of 10 a.m. ET, The firm’s customer support centre, at 1-877-255-2377, carried a brief recorded message reporting a “service interruption” causing delays in e-mail transmission.

A New York media report said the hugely popular BlackBerry system failed around 8 p.m. ET Tuesday and e-mails were not being carried through.

The New York report said company officials were trying to reset the system and were concerned that a backlog of data, which will rush through when it comes back on line, could cause a bigger problem.

RIM has said that about eight million people use the BlackBerry worldwide. About one million U.S. federal government and emergency workers are believed to use the devices.