RIM Notifies of Critical BlackBerry Outage

TORONTO, Feb 12 (Reuters) – A major outage hit BlackBerry users in NorthAmerica on Monday, cutting off wireless e-mail for everyone from busy executivesto political campaign staff on the eve of three U.S. presidentialprimaries.

The problem, which BlackBerry owner Research In Motion described as a"critical severity outage" affecting users in the Americas, once again raisedconcerns about the stability of the e-mail service 10 months after a widespreadcrash last April.

RIM said in a later statement that data services in the Americas experienceddelays on late Monday afternoon, around 3.30pm Eastern time, but were restoredin the early evening at around 6.30pm.

But by about 7:00 p.m. Eastern time some users said a few e-mails weretrickling through while others continued to be without service.

Carmi Levy, senior vice-president of strategic consulting at ARCommunications, said reliability is a serious concern for companies like RIMbecause if problems become routine, they can drive customers away.

"It’s a big issue and it’s a growing issue," Levy said, adding that hugeoutages could prove to be "a major Achilles’ heel" for RIM.

RIM’s U.S. shares fell as much as 1.3 percent on the news, after closing up5.3 percent in regular Nasdaq trade. On the Toronto Stock Exchange, the sharesfinished the day C$4.73 higher at C$94.62.

RIM notified its clients of the outage in an e-mail, but officials at theWaterloo, Ontario-based company were not immediately available for comment.

"This is an emergency notification regarding the current BlackBerryInfrastructure outage," RIM support account manager Bryan Simpson said in ane-mail sent to large clients.

The last big outage in April 2007 provoked an angry backlash from morecompulsive users, who have dubbed the device "CrackBerry" due to its drug-likeaddictiveness. At the time, co-Chief Executive Jim Balsillie said such incidentswere "very rare" and RIM was taking steps to prevent it from happeningagain.

RIM’s worldwide subscriber base reached about 12 million people by late lastyear, mainly executives, politicians, lawyers and other professionals who relyon the BlackBerry to send secure e-mails. Sleeker new models are also catchingon with students and others outside professional circles.

Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman for Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama,said, "While the outage did confirm our widespread addiction to BlackBerryservice, fortunately it did not cause more than a temporaryinconvenience."

Voters go to the polls on Tuesday in Virginia, Maryland and the District ofColumbia, the latest battleground in a tight race between Obama and HillaryClinton for the Democratic nomination in November’s election.

U.S. mobile phone service provider Verizon Wireless said the outage wasaffecting all carriers’ BlackBerry e-mail service in North America. It saidVerizon Wireless customers can still make calls on their BlackBerry.

Some appeared to enjoy a respite from the device.

"It made my life a little bit easier, since I didn’t have to reply," LiberalParty spokesman Jean-Francois Del Torchio said from Parliament Hill inOttawa.

"But when I arrived at my desktop and I saw all the e-mails I received, I waslike, ‘Oh, I still need to work’," Del Torchio told Reuters.

(Additionalreporting by Yinka Adegoke in New York, Scott Hillis in San Francisco, JeffMason in Baltimore and Randall Palmer on Ottawa; Editing by Braden Reddall/Elaine Hardcastle) ($1=$1 Canadian)

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