Users of the popular BlackBerry smart phone device spent most of the morning without the ability to receiving personal e-mail on the mobile phone.
Research in Motion, Ltd. (RIM), the company that makes the popular messaging phones, said in a release Thursday afternoon that they had resolved the problem.
“RIM has isolated and resolved the issue that was impacting some BlackBerry customers earlier this morning. Some customers may still experience delays as e-mail queues are processed. RIM is continuing to investigate the cause of the issue and apologizes for any inconvenience.”
Locally, emergency services and law enforcement were not affected.
Crawford County does not use the BlackBerry for emergency services with either the Sheriff's department or Emergency Medical Services, according to Crawford County Sheriff Sandy Horton.
The outage affected all phones regardless of carrier and earlier in the day, RIM, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, said customers “may be currently experiencing delays receiving e-mail” but phone services and PIN-to-PIN messaging are working just fine.
“Due to the RIM BlackBerry Internet Service outage that affected all carriers, some of AT&T’s BlackBerry customers experienced service issues,” said Marisa Giller, with AT&T Corporate Communications. “We worked with RIM to resolve this issue for our customers.”
Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon and U.S. Cellular were among local carriers affected.
This is not the first time that RIM customers have had issues with service.
According to The Canadian Press, the last time RIM's BlackBerry service had a major outage was in February 2008, when an upgrade to the wireless system appeared to have been behind a three-hour service disruption affecting millions of users in North America.
In April 2008, a software upgrade, that was supposedly a minor upgrade, crashed the system. Another software issue caused a smaller disruption of service in September 2008.
Over the last few years, RIM has attempted to expand more into the consumer market, directly competing with Apple’s iPhone, Palm’s Pré and the newer Motorola Droid.
According to the research firm NPD Group, the BlackBerry Curve was the top-selling smartphone in the U.S. in the third quarter with the iPhone 3GS and 3G in second and third place respectively.
At the end of August, RIM boasted 80 percent of its client base were non-business consumers.
The Associated Press and Bloomberg.com contributed to this report.
Matthew Clark can be reached at matthew.clark@morningsun.net or at 620-231-2600, Ext. 140
PITTSBURG —
