RIM claims fixed BlackBerry in Asia, Europe [U: down again]
updated 09:05 am EDT, Tue October 11, 2011
RIM revives BlackBerry in Eastern hemisphere
(Update: new failure) RIM's Eastern hemisphere BlackBerry outage was restored early Tuesday morning. The company said that services had been brought back online and apologized for the drop. No cause was given, however, despite over 20 hours of outages in Africa, Asia, Europe, and hte Middle East.
Some users on Twitter reported still having problems as of Tuesday morning in North America. T-Mobile UK had a page dealing with it as an active issue.
The nearly day-long failure came at an inopportune time for RIM, with the launch of the iPhone 4S just days away. On Wednesday, Apple will also post iOS 5 and launch iMessage, which promises many of the same features of BlackBerry Messenger but without tying its ability to work to other services.
RIM's protracted outage underscores the major risk of the BlackBerry system. While secure and capable of pushing messages in real time, its dependence on central servers even to route third-party mail accounts creates genuine problems during an outage, where even basics like e-mail and messaging are suddenly turned off.
Update: Along with more users, O2 has also reported knowing of a newer problem. Some of the symptoms are delays and not necessarily outright failures, but they point to the problems persisting for a full day or more.
