OTTAWA — For the second time in less than a year, a technical failure idled the thumbs of many BlackBerry users on Monday by severing their wireless link to e-mail and the Web.
Representatives of several North American carriers said they were told by Research in Motion, the BlackBerry maker, that a significant failure had occurred somewhere in the servers it operates to connect the popular hand-held devices with the Internet. The carriers were told that all operators in North America were affected but not all customers.
“R.I.M.’s having a big shutdown,” said Jim Johansson, a spokesman for Telus, a major Canadian telecommunications company based in Vancouver, British Columbia. “It’s potentially up to half their customers. It seems to be hit and miss.”
Stephanie Vinge-Walsh, a spokeswoman at Sprint Nextel, said that the company’s technical staff was told by R.I.M. that the trouble began at about 3:20 p.m. Eastern time.
But what happened after that point was unclear Monday evening.
Mark Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T, said R.I.M. advised his company that the problem had been fixed early in the evening.
But Mr. Siegel added, “It’s going to take some time with the backlog of messages that developed. As you might imagine, quite a number have built up.” R.I.M. did not give AT&T an estimate for how long it would take to clear the messages, but Mr. Siegel estimated that disruptions would continue for several hours.
But R.I.M., which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, sent a brief statement by e-mail at about the same time Mr. Siegel spoke indicating that the problem was still not fixed.
“Research in Motion is currently working towards a resolution and will provide an update as soon as possible,” the statement said. The company did not respond to requests for further comment.
There are about 12 million BlackBerry users, most of them in North America. While a temporary escape from e-mail may have been a welcome relief for some, the devices are used by many people to perform time-sensitive transactions, particularly in the financial community, and are popular communications tools for emergency personnel.
“This is not an issue with the AT&T network,” Mr. Siegel said. “This is an issue with the R.I.M. network.”
The second major outage of BlackBerry service is an embarrassment for a company which has long made reliability and high levels of security selling points for its premium-priced variety of wireless e-mail. It also comes when the R.I.M. is trying to expand beyond its traditional base of corporate and government users to the broader consumer market with less costly, multimedia models. That move has pitted the successful Canadian company against much larger consumer electronics companies, including Apple.
By coincidence, early on Monday R.I.M. announced a deal with the Vodafone Group, the world’s largest wireless carrier by revenues, to further expand BlackBerry sales to consumers.
Last April, e-mail stopped making its way to about five million BlackBerry users over a period of about 48 hours. As was the case on Monday, R.I.M. left its customers and carriers largely in the dark about the situation.
Once service was fully resumed, the company said the problem was centered in a network operations center near its head office in Ontario that processes every e-mail message produced by a BlackBerry or destined for one of the units.
In that case, the trouble began with the installation of a new piece of software that was supposed to accelerate the handling of e-mail by R.I.M.’s servers. But the company acknowledged that the software had not been adequately tested, and it set up a series of problems with a database that manages the e-mail traffic. An attempt by R.I.M. to switch to a backup system also failed and compounded the problem.
Since then, the company has repeatedly assured investors and customers that it had fully resolved the problem. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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