<<Print>>

The service interruptions began on Monday and initially affected BlackBerry owners in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. By Tuesday, the problem migrated to Brazil, India, Chile and Argentina. On Wednesday, users in North America began complaining of the same disruptions. The failures have left subscribers in the affected regions without access to BlackBerry�s instant messaging service, e-mail and the Web. RIM said Wednesday night that it had restored all those services to customers in the United States, but that it was investigating delays in its messaging service. Wednesday�s hit could not have come at a worse time for RIM, which is fending off a growing crowd of agitated investors calling on the company to explore strategic options and new leadership. Shares of the company have fallen nearly 60 percent this year as smartphone buyers increasingly choose Android phones or iPhones. On Wednesday, news of the spreading network problems caused shares of RIM to dip even lower, falling more than 2 percent to close at $23.88. Analysts say that RIM was battling to restore more than service to the millions faced with malfunctioning BlackBerry cellphone service. The company was also fighting for its foothold in a rapidly changing industry. �It�s symbolic of what�s going on at the company,� said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC partners who follows the telecom industry. �It�s a bloodbath.� The Waterloo, Ontario, company�s grasp on the global smartphone market has steadily declined over the last few years. In 2008, the company commanded 46 percent of the market share for mobile devices around the world, according to data from IDC, a research firm. But by the first half of 2011, that hold had weakened under the surging popularity of the products from rivals, sliding to 12 percent. The company had hoped to revive its business and dazzle consumers with the BlackBerry PlayBook, a 7-inch touch-screen tablet, but the device has yet to gain traction among a broad audience. At the same time, dozens of sleek new Android devices are arriving on store shelves in time for the holiday season and Apple is releasing the latest version of the iPhone on Friday. On Wednesday, in a conference call to address the problems, David Yach, the chief technology officer for software at RIM, said that the company did not find any traces of a security breach. Instead, Mr. Yach said that a switch that linked its internal network to the Internet had failed to function properly. Backup systems designed to support the infrastructure in such instances also failed to work properly, and a backlog of unsent messages began to pile up, choking the system and knocking other portions of the infrastructure offline, he said. �We have global teams working around the clock on this,� he said. �Our top priority is to return services to our customers.� By late Wednesday afternoon, some BlackBerry owners were reporting that service had returned, but Research in Motion executives did not say when they expected normal service. Ken Dulaney, an analyst with Gartner, said that the biggest remaining question was whether the recent hiccups would prompt current BlackBerry owners to switch to other handsets. �Wireless access has become mission-critical, and people depend on it,� he said. �Any kind of outage is a serious problem.� Frustration erupted on social media sites like Twitter and online forums that cater to the owners of BlackBerry devices. �Uugh. If I don�t get back to you today, this is why. BlackBerry outage appears to be spreading,� a user named Diana_Knight posted to Twitter on Wednesday. On CrackBerry.com, a popular forum for BlackBerry owners, a thread called �Enough is Enough� had attracted thousands of views and hundreds of comments by Wednesday afternoon. �This is it. This is the boiling point. Someone has to go over to Waterloo and slap those in charge at RIM,� wrote a user going by the name BlackLion15. Such failures are not rare for RIM. Last month, BlackBerry�s popular messaging service crashed for several hours in parts of Latin America and Canada. Because RIM sends its data through its own servers, any disruptions are felt by larger swaths of users than for other handset makers. That can be infuriating for wireless carriers who are helpless at the annoyances of their customers using BlackBerrys on their network. Representatives for Verizon, AT&T and Deutsche Telekom, all of whom sell BlackBerry phones, declined to comment, deferring to RIM to address the problem. By Wednesday morning, Wall Street was alight with e-mails from tech departments notifying employees of the problem. Bankers� meetings fell through when attendees couldn�t look up the locations. Employees were reduced to leaving voice mail messages. The RIM failure coincided with a major wireless industry conference in San Diego, where many companies that carry RIM�s traffic complained of getting little or no information about just what had gone wrong or how long it would take to fix. Others were less concerned about the industry than their own communications. �With this outage, people will say enough is enough.� said Frank Nein, an industry analyst with 9Sight2020, who said he had met with representatives of RIM Tuesday. �And they didn�t have any answers about the network. They didn�t have any decent response to all these consumer devices coming into their turf.� Mr. Yach said that the company was not currently exploring options such as compensating customers for the period of time their services were offline. �Our priority is getting the service back up and running,� he said. �At the end of the day, that�s what is going to make our customers the happiest.� A few financial professionals saw a small silver lining on Wednesday. Alex Maloney, a director at Perkins Fund Marketing, a placement agent for hedge funds, said the service interruption was a nice vacation from gloomy e-mails. �This is not necessarily the worst time for an outage,� he said. �It�s not like people are getting a whole lot of positive e-mails this day, given the turmoil in the financial markets.�