BlackBerry service restored, slow response irks users

BlackBerry service was mostly restored by late morning Wednesday East Coast time, following a widespread North American outage that started Tuesday evening and has left some users irked enough by Research in Motion's laggard customer service that they are considering finding an alternative.

After repeated attempts to reach RIM representatives in Europe for a response Wednesday, followed by additional attempts to reach someone at the company's Waterloo, Ontario, headquarters a written statement was issued to reporters in Europe through its public-relations agency there, confirming what was already known. There was a "service interruption" affecting users in North America and e-mail delivery was delayed or intermittent during the interruption. Phone service on BlackBerry handsets was not affected, according to the statement.

"Root cause is still under review, but service for most customers was restored overnight and RIM is closely monitoring systems in order to maintain normal service levels," the statement said.

Customers on the BlackBerry Forums discussion board complained of having no service starting at about 5:15 p.m. Pacific Time on Tuesday.

Callers to the BlackBerry U.S. technical support line were still greeted with the following message early Wednesday morning: "We are currently experiencing a service interruption that is causing delays in sending or receiving messages. We apologize for the inconvenience and will provide updates as soon as they become available."

Mobile phone carriers in Europe and the U.S. were reporting Wednesday morning that service was back up. However, representatives of several of those companies said that they had yet to hear an explanation from RIM about why the interruption happened. The RIM Web site did not provide information about the outage.

Apparently, the updates didn't come soon enough for some users, with BlackBerry forums flooded with users seeking information.

David Maynor is thinking about dropping his BlackBerry service because of RIM's poor response to the situation. "I'm actually really mad about it. I'm mad enough to switch to another service," said Maynor, who is chief technology officer with Errata Security Inc. in Atlanta. "Everyone makes mistakes but their cardinal sin is that they didn't inform their users."

Maynor, who has been a BlackBerry customer for three years, was without service from about 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time Tuesday night until 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, he said. He couldn't get information on the outage from the BlackBerry Web site, or by calling his carrier's support line where "wait times were insane." Instead, he had to turn to online BlackBerry discussion forums.

Users at online forums and others contacted by IDG News Service said late Wednesday morning that service was still sporadic. Backlogs of messages were pouring in to BlackBerries, along with some new messages, but service was not yet consistent, users said.

Although RIM has yet to say what caused the problem, Current Analysis Inc. principal analyst Emma Mohr-McClune said the problem could be one of RIM's Network Operating Centers going down. "This has happened before," she said.