Wide BlackBerry Outage Reported
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The second major outage of BlackBerry service in less than a year is an embarrassment for Ontario-based Research in Motion, the maker of Blackberry devices.
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AT&amp;T&#39;s wireless data networks in the Southeast and Midwest U.S. are down, causing BlackBerry and iPhone users to be without data services.The EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) and UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) services in those regions began having problems around 6:30 a.m. EST this morning, said Mark Siegel, an AT&amp;T spokesman. Voice calling has not been affected, but people trying to use wireless data services might have &quot;difficulty,&quot; he said.Several users of a BlackBerry newsgroup have reported being unable to receive data to their handsets. A systems administrator in Kansas reports that BlackBerry devices there are displaying a message that says &quot;data connection refused.&quot;AT&amp;T is still looking into what exactly caused the failure, but technicians have found a solution to the problem and expect the service to be restored by around 3:30 p.m. EST, Siegel said.The iPhone runs on the EDGE network, so users of the phones, as well as any other mobile device that receives data from either of the networks, will have problems using data services.In early 2007, Research In Motion implemented a software upgrade that caused its systems to crash, resulting in a BlackBerry service outage that started in the evening and lasted through the night. This time, the problem appears to be with AT&amp;T&#39;s network and not with RIM&#39;s infrastructure.
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The three-hour outage in Research in Motion's BlackBerry service has yet to be fully explained, but highlights two old stories: the problems with a single point of failure, and the CrackBerry.
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Research in Motion still doesn&#39;t know why its&#160;BlackBerry service went down for several hours&#160;on Monday.&quot;RIM is continuing to investigate the exact cause&quot; of the outage, the company said in a statement Tuesday. Late Monday, it apologized for any inconvenience caused by the incident, which left customers throughout North America without current e-mail for about three hours starting around 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time.It was the second major outage in less than a year for the popular mobile data service, on which about 12 million subscribers depended at the beginning of last December. The&#160;previous problem, which occurred last April, was caused by a minor software upgrade that went awry, followed by a failed switchover to a backup system, according to RIM. The company said soon afterward that it had identified &quot;certain aspects of its testing, monitoring and recovery processes that will be enhanced&quot; as a result of the failure.BlackBerry e-mail traverses a complex infrastructure involving mobile operator networks, RIM&#39;s network operations center, and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers within companies that use the service. It pushes messages from enterprise e-mail systems, including Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes, out to the popular BlackBerry devices.The system is getting yet more complicated as RIM adds third-party services to appeal to consumers, said Albert Lin, an analyst at investment bank Sooner Cap. As the company tries to keep up with rapid growth in its subscribers -- last year&#39;s fiscal third quarter saw a net gain of 1.65 million -- these types of glitches are to be expected, Lin said.&quot;It&#39;s hard to really expect any major service provider to be 100 percent reliable,&quot; Lin said. Although enterprises now have more push e-mail alternatives than they did when the BlackBerry debuted in 1999, those competitors, such as Visto and Motorola&#39;s Good Technology system, aren&#39;t significantly more dependable, he said.&quot;When it comes to reliable push e-mail ... it&#39;s still hard to find a solution that works better than BlackBerry,&quot; Lin said.
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The BlackBerry wireless e-mail device  is now being used by a record two million subscribers, less  than a year after it topped the one million market, Research In  Motion Ltd. (RIM) RIM.TO said on Wednesday.
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Second-gen 8800 to get WLAN tech? The BlackBerry range has taken a step closer towards bringing Wi-Fi on board following claims that Research in Motion (RIM) has gained the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) approval to include the connectivity feature in its handsets.â¦
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Research In Motion acknowledged an outage left users in the Americas without access to their BlackBerry e-mail service on Monday, but said no messages were lost during the incident.
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A national outage affected AT&T's Uverse television service on Sunday, completely knocking out service for several hours, the company confirmed.
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Research In Motion's    ubiquitous BlackBerry experienced a "critical severity outage"  on Monday afternoon that left users stranded without wireless  e-mail access, its maker said.
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After an outage Tuesday morning knocked out phone service to an estimated 20,000 locations in West Virginia, FiberNet -- the company whose systems failed -- is still working on the problem over 24 hours later. Hospitals and police departments have been given priority, however, and most had phone service restored early Wednesday.
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Internet outages disrupted business and personal usage across a wide swathe of the Middle East on Wednesday after two undersea cables in the Mediterranean were damaged, government officials and Internet service providers said.
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Some smartphone AT&T subscribers have been experiencing difficulty accessing the company's 3G and EDGE data services since 6:30 a.m. EST.
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Blog: AT&T's wireless data subscribers complained of outages and a slow network Monday, but the company says it wasn't due to the iPhone.
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E-mail service of Research In Motion's   BlackBerry smartphones experienced a "critical  severity outage" on Monday, the company told clients in an  e-mail.
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While cable thefts and vandalism are a problem for utility companies nationwide, Verizon says the problem is especially bad in West Virginia, where over 17,000 customers, including first responders, have lost service for up to five days.
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Some BlackBerry users in North America experienced problems on Friday when a software issue meant that the email service shut down, leaving the handheld device&#39;s email capabilities disabled.
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Even users of a new version complain of hours-long outages, feature malfunctions and data loss.