News

Millions of BlackBerry users were cut off from their wireless lifelines Monday when a massive server outage caused the popular handheld devices to fail across North America.

Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry, issued a brief statement confirming the problem began at approximately 3:30 p.m. and apologizing to customers. But it was not immediately clear what caused the outage, and service was restored approximately three hours later.

"BlackBerry data services in the Americas experienced intermittent delays on late Monday afternoon. … No messages were lost and message queues began to be cleared after normal service levels were restored. RIM continues to focus on providing industry-leading reliability in its products and services and apologizes to customers for any inconvenience."

Monday's outage was unsettling news for the Waterloo, Ont., company, which is facing mounting pressure from devices running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile software and Apple Inc.'s widely popular iPhone — currently not available in Canada — in the market for e-mail-equipped business cellphones.

"A lot will depend on how quickly RIM can recover from this," Info-Tech Research Group senior analyst Michelle Warren said earlier Monday.

After voicing criticisms over a slow response and poor communication during an outage last April, RIM's clients will be watching the company's response to this blackout, Ms. Warren said.

"RIM is going to have to respond quickly, provide updates and solve whatever caused the problem," she said. "Otherwise I imagine we're going to see more IT managers look at Windows Mobile as a platform."

The outage left business executives, politicians and others addicted to the "CrackBerry" without wireless e-mail access.

David Hurford, spokesman for Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan and an avid BlackBerry user, said it took him about a half hour to notice something was wrong. "Usually I'm getting lots of e-mails and we have a busy day. Then I go to my desktop and I'm seeing e-mails on my desktop that I'm not getting on my BlackBerry. Then I clued in," he said.

Mr. Hurford took Monday's outage in stride. "Sometimes we all need a break from our BlackBerrys," he said.

A couple of days after last April's outage, the company said the crash was prompted by the installation of new software, and the failure of a backup system. It also said that it was making internal changes to ensure that a massive outage didn't happen again.

Concerns were raised by analysts that it could happen again, but RIM co-chief executive officer Jim Balsillie told Reuters news agency at the time that such outages were "rare."

Although RIM has recently stepped up its efforts to grab a larger share of the consumer cellphone market with such sleek devices as the BlackBerry Pearl, about two-thirds of the company's 12 million global BlackBerry customers still come from the worlds of business and government.

RIM's biggest advantage over its competitors is its system of Network Operating Centres, which provide a direct link between the company and the BlackBerry Enterprise Software that organizations install on their servers to connect and run individual devices.

While NOC failures are rare, when one goes down, thousands of customers are left with lifeless BlackBerrys. Analysts speculated that at least two NOCs failed Monday, causing the outage.

With a report from Reuters