Tip UsMost BlackBerry users over in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina are without essential BlackBerry service. BBM, email and web access are a no go for these BlackBerry users. To make matters worse, there are reports now that users in the United States and Canada are suffering from the same outage.
RIM has been apologetic and has top men working on getting the issue resolved, but has no idea what’s causing it. All they know is that the downtime was “caused by a core switch failure” and was supposed to switch over to a back-up switch if the core switch ever failed, but that didn’t happen. This left “a large backlog of data” that RIM is trying to clear.
Three days into the outage now and RIM’s engineers are still trying figure out what exactly is going on. They’re not ruling out anything at this point and even hacking isn’t out of the question.
At this point, it looks like BlackBerry users are resorting to Twitter to release all of their somber feelings of not having BBM service, and who can blame them?
Some carriers are stepping up and giving affected BlackBerry users free service for the amount of days that BlackBerry service has been down.
Something interesting to note is that Apple’s iOS 5 is officially launching today, bringing with it iMessage. This comes on a day where BBM service is down. iMessage is already expected to cut into RIM’s BBM userbase, but will this outage tempt more BlackBerry users to switch over?
via [SlashGear]
