BlackBerry’s blackout may have affected mn

TORONTO: BlackBerry service was being restored on Wednesday morning after an overnight outage that left millions of users without mobile access to their e-mail on the popular device.

Research in Motion, the Canadian company that provides the devices and e-mail service, said the service interruption began on Tuesday night, affecting users in North America.

“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 statement from RIM said. It was not immediately clear whether the problems affected all cellular carriers that offer BlackBerry service.

Reports of trouble with BlackBerry e-mail began to surface as early as 8 pm EST on Tuesday. Phone service on the handhelds was not impacted. Some users in Toronto, Montreal and Waterloo, Ontario — where RIM’s headquarters are located — said they weren’t affected by the problem.

The urgency of a BlackBerry outage became glaringly apparent on 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.

“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. Last week, RIM reported that it added about one million BlackBerry subscriber accounts during the first three months of 2007, bringing its total subscriber base to eight million.

General Motors Corp spokesman Chris Preus, who is based in Detroit, was one of several US-based participants on a press trip in China who had intermittent or blacked out BlackBerry coverage. The BlackBerry service is “the only way I have to communicate,” said Preuss, who was in Liuzhou, China, for a press trip of a General Motors joint venture factory. “When I lose it, it’s paralysing.”

NTT DoCoMo Inc hasn’t received any reports about problems with the BlackBerry service, spokesman Masanori Goto said by phone. Taiwan Mobile, which carries the BlackBerry service in Taiwan, had no reports of problems, said Shirley Zhu, a spokeswoman for the Taipei-based operator.

Research In Motion had 45% of the US market for advanced phones with features such as e-mail in the fourth quarter, according to Framingham, Massachusetts-based researcher IDC. Sunnyvale, California-based Palm was second with 18%, while Schaumburg, Illinois-based Motorola had 12%.

Jitters about the outage sent RIM’s share price sliding in the opening minutes of Wednesday’s trading, but the stock recovered quickly. The stock was changing hands at $130.65 a share, down 62 cents, on the Nasdaq Stock Market after falling as low as $128.80.