Millions of BlackBerry users remained without service on Wednesday as a three-day service outage spread to North America, causing massive frustrations for people who rely on these smartphones for business and personal communications.
“BlackBerry subscribers in the Americas may be experiencing intermittent service delays this morning,” Research in Motion, maker of BlackBerry smartphones, said in a statement. “We are working to resolve the situation as quickly as possible and we apologize to our customers for any inconvenience. We will provide a further update as soon as more information is available.”
The outage now affects people on every continent but Antarctica, according to the company’s statements.
An “extremely critical issue” on the BlackBerry network caused the outage, Stephen Bates, RIM’s managing director in the U.K., told CNN’s Richard Quest. He added: “We’re putting all of our focus with all of our engineers and all of our network specialists on trying to understand the nature of why this backup system didn’t work as it should have …”
No customer e-mails have been completely lost, and they will be delivered eventually, RIM said in a press conference on Wednesday afternoon, according to CNNMoney’s Julianne Pepitone.
The company said it is working “around the clock” to fix the problem.
“A large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible,” the Tuesday statement said. “We apologize for any inconvenience and we will continue to keep you informed.”
There are about 70 million BlackBerry users worldwide. RIM has not commented on how many users are affected, but reports suggest the number of users without some sort of service has climbed into the millions.
They say its Steve Jobs in Heaven, controling….soon Microsoft, lol!!!
They never seem to affect us 🙂