BlackBerry Users Start to Receive E-Mail Again As Company Looks for the Cause

By DAVID FRIEND

TORONTO (CP) – BlackBerry addicts breathed sighs of relief Wednesday as e-mail began to trickle into their portable devices after more than 12 hours of down time and little explanation from the company.

A technical problem brought traffic on many of the devices to a screeching halt Tuesday night, affecting e-mail and access to the Internet. Research In Motion (TSX:RIM), developer of the BlackBerry, 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.”

Reports of trouble with BlackBerry e-mail began to surface as early as 8 p.m. ET Tuesday. Phone service through the handhelds was not impacted.

Some users in both Montreal and Waterloo, Ont. – where RIM’s headquarters are located – said they weren’t affected by the problem.

Comment from RIM came hours after users had already congregated on Internet message boards to discuss the problems and question why the company hadn’t issued a statement earlier.

“For a company that revolves around communication technology… they sure are doing a crap job in communicating directly with their clients in a situation like this,” wrote one forum user.

The urgency of a BlackBerry outage became glaringly apparent Wednesday. The device, often humorously referred to as “CrackBerry” by ardent users, is known as the device of choice for the business community where they are used to discuss deals, schedule plans and monitor after-hours trading.

In Ottawa, some Canadian politicians expressed their dismay with the down time, while others said it proved they were addicted.

Liberal MP Garth Turner, known for his constant Internet blogging, said politicians were scrambling to find other ways to communicate when the system went down.

“We all lost our data when we were in the House of Commons last night. The sound of BlackBerrys being thrown against the desk was deafening for a while,” he said.

“Because it has become the de facto channel of communications around this place, it actually impacts on the government of Canada and the work of the whole House of Commons.”

Dimitri Soudas, the prime minister’s press secretary, receives between 600 and 700 BlackBerry e-mails each day. He said his device stopped working for a brief period of time Wednesday morning.

The BlackBerry outage “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.”

Hirsch said RIM has two network operation centres that manage the North American network. One is intended to work as a backup if the other crashes. He suggests that both of them went down.

“This is definitely a proprietary approach that they’ve taken which is not the industry norm,” he said, adding that major companies like IBM and Google instead use the Internet instead of their own private servers, which lessens the effect from any technical crashes.

“The Internet has to go down to affect them in such a way. Because the Internet is distributed so largely it just doesn’t happen any more,” he said.

RIM representatives weren’t available to confirm or deny those claims.

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

As of 11 a.m. ET, The firm’s customer support centre, at 1-877-255-2377, carried a brief recorded message reporting “technical difficulties with BlackBerry services that may cause delays in sending or receiving” e-mail messages.

A New York media 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.

In June 2005, the company experienced an outage of its e-mail services that appeared to only affect devices on GSM cellular networks, the wireless standard that’s dominant in Europe and other regions. That outage affected big U.S. carriers Cingular and T-Mobile, while others only saw a slowdown in message traffic.