BlackBerry outages spread to North America

LONDON,  (Reuters) – A three-day disruption to  BlackBerry services spread to North America today,  frustrating millions of users of the Research In Motion   devices just two days before rival Apple’s new iPhone  4S goes on sale.
RIM advised clients of an outage in the Americas and said it  was working to restore services as customers in Europe, the  Middle East, Africa and India continued to suffer patchy email  and no access to browsing and messaging.
RBC analysts Mike Abramsky and Paul Treiber estimated that  about half of BlackBerry’s 70 million subscribers outside North  America could be affected.
RIM, which had said yesterday services had returned to  normal, said later it was still working to resolve the problem.
“The messaging and browsing delays … were caused by a core  switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure,” it said. “As a  result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now  working to clear that backlog and restore normal service.”
RIM did not say how long it might take. In India, top mobile  carrier Bharti Airtel sent text messages to customers  saying BlackBerry services were likely to be restored in four to  five hours.
The service disruptions are the worst since an outage swept  north America two years ago, and come as Apple prepares to put  on sale its already sold-out iPhone 4S on Friday.
“It’s a blow upon a bruise. It comes at a bad time,” said  Richard Windsor, global technology specialist at Nomura.
“One possibility could be that it encourages client  companies to look more at other options such as allowing users  to connect their own devices to the corporate server and save  themselves the cost of buying everyone a BlackBerry.”
Many companies, no longer seeing the need to pay to be  locked into RIM’s secure proprietary email service, have already  begun allowing employees to use alternative smartphones,  particularly Apple’s iPhone, for corporate mail.
RIM has made inroads into the youth market and into  developing economies attracted by its free BlackBerry Messenger  (BBM) service, partially compensating for its losses in the  corporate market in North America and Western Europe.
RBC said the latest crisis could hurt RIM’s reputation in  these key markets, particularly after high-profile tussles with  states whose governments demanded access to encrypted  communications for security reasons.
“Following recent high-profile sovereign challenges to open  up RIM’s secure networks… these outages create another highly  visible PR challenge, coming in markets where the company is  still growing,” its analysts wrote in a note.