BlackBerry woes worsen as outage hits US & RIM homeland Canada

While Research In Motion (RIM) continues to attempt to reconnect users cut from BlackBerry’s BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS), news is filtering in that users of the smartphone in North America have also been hit with service failures.

The failure of BIS, which bar a relatively short period when it was back up, has persisted for the past three days.

Without BIS, which many BlackBerry users cite as the most attractive feature of the smartphones, users are unable to connect to email, the web, and applications on their mobiles.

The failure was initially experienced by users in the EMEA region, which comprises Europe, the Middle-East, and Africa.

When RIM released its last statement on the blackout, it cited users in the EMEA region along with those in India, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina as being subject to the cut off from online-communications. Some reports have included Asian markets, such as Hong-Kong, Japan, and Singapore as also having experienced blackouts.

The latest reports now also point to users in North America being affected.

According to Reuters, RIM advised clients that it was dealing with an outage in the Americas, similar to service interferences that have stricken other parts of the world.

American news association, National Public Radio (NPR), also said in an official blog post that NPR staff who used BlackBerrys were reporting that “emails they’ve sent today haven’t gotten to their destinations”.

Canada, where RIM is based, has also started experiencing service outages.

According to an online report from Canadian news channel CP24, Canadians began experiencing outages early Wednesday morning. There was then a brief restoration of services before the network began “crumbling again”.

In line with what has become an emerging trend throughout the crisis, RIM spokespeople were not available for comment to CP24, leaving carriers to respond to enquiries.

The news channel quotes a spokesperson for a Canadian carrier as saying “a minority of BlackBerry users at all Canadian carriers are affected”, and that, “We understand the issue will be corrected this morning”.

The last official statement from RIM, which came late Tuesday evening prior to service failures spreading to North America, explained that the outages were caused by a “core switch failure” within RIM’s infrastructure and that the company was working to clear up data backlogs caused by this “as quickly as possible”.