Undoubtedly, it wasn’t the holiday break that Research in Motion had in mind for its BlackBerry customers. On Tuesday night, a second e-mail outage hit BlackBerry customers — following another one a week ago.
RIM acknowledged that “some BlackBerry customers in the Americas are currently experiencing delays in message delivery.” It apologized “for any inconvenience,” adding that its engineers were “actively working to resolve this issue for those impacted.”
On Wednesday, RIM released a new version of its BlackBerry Messenger that apparently solved the outage problem. RIM manages the messaging network itself, so a problem can affect millions of users. An earlier update to the service was apparently the cause of the outage.
Could Be Worldwide
While RIM’s statement specifically mentioned customers in the Americas, there were also reports of problems for BlackBerry users in China, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan, India and Singapore.
According to hundreds of messages posted on Twitter and other social-networking services, RIM watchers estimated the outage was large and impacted users on a variety of carriers.
The outage follows one last Thursday, when some BlackBerry customers reported they weren’t able to receive messages over a period of several hours. The previous reported outage was in February 2008, following a software upgrade, and there was one in April 2007.
Avi Greengart, an analyst with industry research firm Current Analysis, said “it isn’t clear what’s going on.” He noted that the outage affected him and his coworkers.
Given the highly competitive environment for smartphones, where a slipup by one platform can lead to a perceived advantage for others, Greengart said the outage didn’t appear to be something that will help the competition.
“Similar problems in the past have not yet affected BlackBerry sales one iota,” Greengart said.
Not Yet ‘A Tipping Point’
Recently, RIM announced a 59 percent increase in third-quarter income, the result of more…