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Email and Internet service to notoriously addictive
BlackBerry cellphones in North America stopped working for several
hours on Monday.
Canada-based Research In Motion,
maker of ubiquitous BlackBerry mobile devices that combine
telephone, email, and Internet capabilities, notified US and
Canadian telecom carriers on Monday afternoon of a major disruption
of service.
The problem evidently affected
all carriers in North America and was with the RIM network that
handles wireless data transmission, not with the telephone network,
said AT&T wireless division spokesman Mark Siegel.
"You are not getting email,
or have trouble accessing the Internet ... all the data
functions," Siegel told AFP during the outage.
BlackBerry was out in Canada and
the United States for a couple of hours.
"We heard from RIM that the
problem is solved and service restored," Siegel said as evening
neared. "It could take a couple of hours to have the backlog of
emails, as you can imagine, cleared up."
Telecom firms in both countries
were quick to stress that the problem was with RIM's network, not
theirs.
"The problem is on the RIM
side," Bell Canada spokesman Jason Laszlo told AFP. "I
believe it is an issue with the (computer) servers."
RIM did not return telephone or
email requests by AFP for comment.
Disruption of BlackBerry service
poses a major bane for business and government employees who rely
extensively on the devices to get work done while on the move.
Reliance on BlackBerry
"smart phones" is so fierce that they have been jokingly
dubbed "CrackBerries" in a reference to a tendency for its
owners to compulsively check email as if it were an addiction.
 --AFP
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