Research in Motion grinds to a halt as Blackberry blackout goes global

Millions of people are feeling CrackBerry withdrawal symptoms as a blackout inhibiting all email, texting and browsing enters its third day. While the problem had originally been restricted to Europe, Asia and Africa (if three continents can count as “restricted”), Canadian users found themselves disconnected this morning as the outage crossed over to the Americas. RIM blames the catastrophe on a “core switch failure” at its head office in Waterloo that has caused a massive backlog of data—unlike most phone companies, RIM handles all email and message traffic internally. Hurt most are RIM’s favourite users: business people, who rely on steady and secure service. (Although if BlackBerrys are really as popular among execs as is often claimed, we’re surprised the global economy didn’t shut down within the hour). And while there’s no good time for a widespread service failure, hitting on iPhone 4S launch week seems like a cruel joke. We wanted to check on how the beleaguered company is coping, but strangely RIM did not respond to our BBM messages for comment. Read the entire story [The Globe and Mail] »